We posed this question to Cathy Scott. Here’s how she responded:
The photo on the cover of The Killing of Tupac Shakur was the last photo taken of Tupac alive. It was shot by amateur photographer Leonard Jefferson on the Las Vegas Strip during stop-and-go traffic, as the car carrying Shakur slowly turned right onto Flamingo Road, a couple blocks before Koval. The cover photo shows Suge Knight with a red towel -- the color of choice for the Piru Bloods gang, on the car consul. It’s the autopsy photo -- taken of Tupac in the morgue for the purposes of documentation -- that’s been controversial (and for more reasons than one, including an unlikely and unrelated storm in gossip site's TMZ.com's teacup back in May 2014 - click to read what went down). This is a passage from the book and what Jefferson told me when I interviewed him about the last-seen-alive photo.
"I was making my way through traffic," Leonard explained. "There was a light. Cars were stopping and I looked over. It was a BMW. I saw 'Pac and Suge and I hollered, 'What's up, man? Where you guys headed?'" "We're going to a club. Follow us," Tupac replied. "Let me get a picture real quick," Leonard called back, grabbing his camera from his front seat and snapping what would turn out to be the iconic photograph of Suge and Tupac as they sat in the BMW, stuck in traffic on Las Vegas Boulevard, moments before the bullets were fired.
To further clarify, the final photo taken of Tupac alive was taken on the Strip but Tupac was shot just east of the Strip, at Koval and Flamingo, while stopped at that intersection in front of what was then the Maxim hotel, now the Westin Casuarina.
Tupac’s fifth solo album, titled "Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory" and released after his death, was put out under the pseudonym 'Makaveli' and somehow Tupac's identifying himself with that notorious moniker seems to have fanned the flames of the conspiracy theories and provided some "evidence" or confirmation to those who wish to buy into the notion that Tupac somehow tricked the public and faked his own death. Arch political pragmatist Niccolò Machiavelli, the sixteenth-century Florentine writer and political philosopher best known for his cynical political treatise The Prince, was deceptive and cunning and an advocate of staging one’s own death as a tactic to gain political advantage. Still, while Tupac was no doubt attracted to the sinister implications and implicit power of the infamous historical name, taking on a customized "street" version of the moniker, Makaveli, when he formed the back-up band the Outlawz, each member chose a new handle, including Sadat, Kadafi, and Edi, and for Tupac 'Makaveli' likely had no deeper fundamental significance than as a provocative fashion statement.
Still, some fans believed, and still do, that the slain rapper was sending them clues indicating that he was still alive. To see some greater "plan" or force at work behind Tupac's dalliance with Machiavelli, however, would seem to be reading way too much into what was fundamentally just another provocative stage persona. Insiders at label Death Row even maintained that the album was essentially a "tongue-in-cheek" side project that was only intended to be have been released as a subtle underground "alter-ego" album; only when Tupac got murdered were all eyes suddenly on "Don Killuminati", which shot to No. 1 on the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart and the Billboard 200, going on to achieve quadruple platinum status within three years of its release.
As far as all the urban myths, and conspiracy theories, and superstition surrounding Tupac and his death are concerned, from the insights gained from spending considerable time with many of those closest to him, it's my opinion as his biographer that it was his fans, not Tupac, who seriously got into numerology, most likely from the sense of denial and search for a meaning that often comes when an influential artist dies suddenly and young. The number theory came up following Tupac’s murder, with some fans and observers noting an apparent pattern involving the number '7' as proof that there was some higher power at work: The rapper was shot on September 7 and died seven days later, at 4:03 (4+3=7), and at the age of 25 (2+5=7). And so on.
To this day, the most popular account has it that the rapper's been sighted alive and well and living in Cuba -- as even Suge Knight has intimated is the case in recent times (but Suge's hardly a reliable witness to anything, we would venture). According to what was this popular almost-timely vision of the future, Shakur was set to return at some point in 2014 in order to facilitate a thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba. In light of recent developments, perhaps the numerologists are correct and 2Pac's been pulling some strings down there, but we doubt it.
Something similar in terms of superstition and numerology took place regarding the murders of both presidents Kennedy and Lincoln, where numerical coincidence was also cited as somehow being significant and suggestive of conspiracy. Both presidents were elected to the House of Representatives in '46; each was elected to the presidency in ’60; Lincoln defeated incumbent Vice President John C. Breckenridge for the presidency in 1860; Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard M. Nixon in 1960; and so on... Both of their successors were born in ’08.
While considering such coincidences can make for an interesting diversion and some colorful folklore, I would venture that it all adds up to nothing more than that and that it's easy to read patterns into numbers and dates if you want to badly enough. What about all the significant numbers surrounding Tupac's death that had nothing to do with the number seven, for example? He was shot at approximately 11:10 p.m. and died on 13/9/1996. While Suge's club, to which they were en route, was located at 1700 E. Flamingo (a tenuous link at best) and would later change its name to Club Seven, the name of the venue at that time of the shooting was Club 662.
