James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond admitted to arranging the 1994 ambush of Tupac Shakur that almost resulted in the rapper’s death, The Village Voice reports.
Rosemond is not having a good month. He was found guilty on 13 counts of drug charges June 5 and was more recently indicted on a murder-for-hire charge June 22, according to The New York Times.
However, he will not be charged with what is perhaps his most culturally significant revelation, arranging “the near-fatal 1994 ambush of rap star Tupac Shakur at New York’s Quad Recording Studios that marked a pivotal moment in American pop history,” The Voice reported.
Facing a life sentence for his drug convictions, Rosemond’s confession came out during an attempt to make a deal with the prosecutors that would reduce his sentence. He apparently “came clean… shortly after his former best friend, Dexter Isaac, stepped forward last summer to publicly confess that he had led the attack on Shakur in 1994,” according to The Voice.
Isaac admitted he was payed $2,500 by Rosemond to rob the rapper at the studio, “plus all the jewelry I took, except for one ring, which [Rosemond] wanted for himself… I still have as proof the chain that we took that night in the robbery,” he allegedly wrote in a statement released to allhiphop.com.
The shooting, which “turned friends Tupac and The Notorious B.I.G. into bitter enemies and eventually led to demise of both of their lives,” was classified as a robbery and because the statue of limitations on robbery is seven years, “the involved parties will see zero jail time for this,” according to Hip Hop Wired.
The Voice reported that Rosemond’s confession “surfaced May 14 during a sidebar in the same Brooklyn federal court where Rosemond was later convicted of operating a multimillion-dollar crack ring.”
Many accused Rosemond of involvement in the Quad Studio attack at the time and Tupac even mentioned the tension existing between the two before the shooting in his song, “Against All Odds,” whose lyrics include:
Promised a payback, Jimmy Henchman, in due time
I know you bitch niggas is listenin, The World Is Mine
Set me up, wet me up, niggas stuck me up
Heard the guns bust but you tricks never shut me up
The attack “sparked a new level of violence in the East v. West Coast rap war … Though rumors had circled the incident for years, no one was found guilty of the crime,” reported The Huffington Post.
