Legends get biopics. Those left behind get trapped in pay-to-play YouTube purgatory. 2Pac’s lyrics constantly weighed whether there is a heaven for a gangster. We’ll never know the answer, but I can tell you that hell is other people’s podcasts.
Late in the afternoon of August 18, the second day of 2Pac’s murder trial, the former head of Death Row security, Reggie Wright Jr. artfully rebutted a cross-execution attempt from Keffe D’s attorney, Michael Sanft. The testimony followed incendiary and surreal testimony from ex-Death Row enforcer, James “Mob James” McDonald, who insisted that he should be treated as a “hostile witness.”
“At some point you instructed Keffe D that he could actually make money doing that YouTube stuff?” The defense tried to trip up Wright Jr., who has long factored into the broader conspiracy swirl surrounding the death of 2Pac.
About a decade ago, the ex-LAPD detective Russell Poole spent the better part of a summer on the phone with me, unspooling his steadfast conviction that Wright Jr. had plotted to murder Suge Knight in a palace coup alongside Suge’s estranged wife, Sharitha. In his theory, Wright Jr. would have received the label and she would have inherited everything else, as long as it happened before the ink on the divorce papers was dry. In this would-be revolution, 2Pac was just a Thug Life-inked egg cracked to make an omelette.
“I did pass [Keffe D’s] number on to a few YouTube channels,” Wright, an inveterate podcast guest and sometime host, responded. “After he and I had this discussion about doing something on my channel. But I refused to pay him, I’m not giving [money to] someone who I believe is 2Pac’s killer.”
That’s how this all started. An entire economy built on manufactured controversy, embroidered memories, and YouTube interrogators who give vultures a bad name. Vultures don’t kill anything, but the list of penitentiary sentences that started as “content” grows longer by the day. These amoral conspiracy merchants will pay anyone, trustworthy or not, in the interest of naming names and “asking questions.”
I’m not saying that none of it is true. That’s how they hook you. A serial liar whose claims can be easily disproved rarely gets invited back again. What’s most highly valued is those who can build a labyrinth from a few shaky half-truths. There is more money in errors than exactitude. If you get just enough wrong, the comment sections will be flooded, the engagement rate soars, the outrage algorithm is satiated. In this sinister Gehenna, you can easily click your way to any talking skull that indulges your preferred intrigue.
In his hour-plus on the witness stand, Wright Jr. recounted his personal history, his path to becoming the capo at Death Row, and his actions on Sept. 7, 1996 and the weeks that followed.
