Videographer Gobi M. Rahimi recalls the rapper's final hours on the 20th anniversary of his murder.
About eight months before Tupac Shakur was shot down during a drive-by in an intersection east of the Las Vegas Strip, videographer Gobi M. Rahimi got into a water gun fight with the rapper in an L.A. backyard.
It was early 1996, and Rahimi—who, with his partner Tracy Robinson, worked on music videos for Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, and Pharcyde—had been called on to meet with Tupac. The rapper, his family, and members of his Outlawz crew were grilling in the backyard, smoking weed, and shooting each other with water guns. Pac took a break to talk money over the phone with Death Row Records boss Suge Knight. Rahimi decided to pick up his gun. He squirted it into the air, and within a few seconds, the Outlawz had him surrounded. They sprayed him; he tried to hit them back. And suddenly Tupac broke into the middle all of it.
"'That's what I'm talking about. This motherfu*ker won't give up. All you motherfu*kers are attacking him. That's a Crazy Iranian,'" Rahimi recalls Tupac saying. "That's the first time he called me the Crazy Iranian. And at that time I was like, 'I love this guy.'"
In the months leading up to his death, then 30-year-old Rahimi worked on or directed most of Tupac's videos, including "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted," "How Do U Want It," and the rapper's final video, "Made nikkaz." Today, he's working on a film called 7 Dayz about the final week of Tupac's life.
Amid growing tension with Death Row Records, Suge convinced Tupac to go see Mike Tyson's fight against Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand on September 7. That night, after a scrap in the MGM following the fight, Tupac and Suge made their way to a party at Knight's Club 662 in a black BMW 750. At 11:15 p.m., on the corner of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane, an unidentified white Cadillac pulled up to the right of the BMW and opened fire. Tupac was hit four times and rushed to University Medical Center. This is what happened, in Rahimi's words, between the shooting and Tupac's death in a hospital bed at 4:03 p.m. on September 13, 1996.
September 7 was Tracy, my partner's, birthday. So I kind of convinced her and a few other production people to go to Vegas to celebrate. She was very against the idea because she didn't want to be around Death Row people and didn't enjoy the idea of Vegas. I kind of knew we had to be there for some reason.
We made it out there. I tried to get us tickets to the fight, and I couldn't get into the fight, so we went to 662 because we planned on meeting Tupac there. We were hanging out in the club, and the atmosphere was just off. There was a bunch of gangbangers and policemen. The place was filled with cops and unsavory characters. I remember Nate Dogg was walking through the crowd up to every group of people he recognized, and he finally walked up to us and said, "Pac and Suge have been shot."
We found out that he had been taken to University Medical Center. We went there, and I remember one of the first things I saw was Kidada Jones and his cousin Jamala crying on the pay phones. Everyone else that was in the ER waiting room was Suge's people. It was his mom and dad, it was his lawyer, it was Reggie Wright—and there was no one there for Tupac. It was just us. Within an hour, the nurse came out and walked up to Suge's mom. Suge's mom said, "How's my baby, how's my baby?" And the nurse said, "Ma'am, your son's fine. He got hit with a piece of shrapnel. Probably a piece of glass. We're going to give him a couple of stitches, and he's going to be taken to a private room within an hour." Then she turned to us and said, "Unfortunately, for Tupac, it's not the same situation. His right lung was shot, so we had to remove it. There will be a series of reparative operations, and it will probably take 12 hours."
Basically, that was the first night of me sitting watch from 12 to eight in the morning for the next six nights. The scariest thing about that night is that it was really just me and Tracy. We were the only ones from Pac's camp. His fiancée and his cousin were just bawling in the corner. They tried to get some Death Row security but couldn't find anyone who were normally his two security guards. We were just scared sh*tless. For me, it was like Enzo the baker in The Godfather. We had no clue what to do, but we knew we had to be there. The next day, we tried to get him moved from the first floor where you could see into his room, but we got no help from the hospital administration.
It was the scariest six nights of my life. There were undercover FBI agents, the police weren't helping, I got one of the death threats. The marketing director came up to me on the third day and said, "They called the Row, they're going to come finish him off." Then he walked away. So I called Vegas PD and said, "Send the troops—they're going to come finish Tupac off." The lady came back on the phone and said, "Sir, we're a little understaffed right now, so if anything should happen, go get the foot patrol in the hospital." Immediately, I was like: Something's a little off here. I remembered that earlier that day we had a press conference, so I called all the local news stations and said, "Every hour there will be a news conference." And I thought, "At least there will be people here with cameras if sh*t should go down."
Inside The black car in which rapper Tupac Shakur was fatally shot by unknown drive-by assassins as he was riding with Suge Knight.
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