'TUPAC ASSASSINATION'

Put all your theories to rest, at least for a moment. Producers RJ Bond (a documentarian) and author and former Tupac bodyguard Frank Alexander have pieced together the latest documentary on the murder of famed hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur.

The DVD, Titled "Tupac Assassination: Conspiracy or Revenge," hits stores tomorrow, Tuesday, October 23 and adds more information to all the speculations surrounding the rapper's death and includes never before seen interviews with his bodyguards (who incidentally were never questioned by police).

The film's production duo has been friends for the better part of ten years. The relationship dawned the year of Tupac's death. In the midst of working on separate projects - Alexander had published the book "Got Your Back: Protecting Tupac" and had started work on the documentary "Before I Wake" while Bond had finished up work on a documentary about the Titanic - the two began talks of doing a 10th anniversary project on the death of Pac.

"We started out with the title 'Tupac Evolution.' It was more of a ten-year anniversary story; where hip-hop has gone ten years after the death of Tupac," Alexander explained. "As we were going through the concept of the story and the direction that we were going in, we ended up changing it to 'Tupac Revelation' because of all the material and the things we were finding, everything was becoming such a revelation. That direction began to change as well. The deeper we started digging, we no longer thought that we had the evolution or the revelation; the direction led us into an assassination plot and that's how we came upon the title."

The dynamic of the DVD is also in the subtitle of the film: "Tupac Assassination: Conspiracy or Revenge" leaves the answer up to the viewer.

"The reason the subtitle asks more of a question is because the focus of the DVD is really to present the facts as we've collected them and to let the person watching the DVD make the decision," Bond said. "Was it a conspiracy or was it simply revenge? There are so many myths and so many theories about what happened to Tupac and even what happened to Biggie Smalls (Notorious B.I.G.) and each one of those theories is based on one of those two elements. So that's really what we did in styling the DVD … to pose the question so that people understand that they're allowed to be the judge."

That is one vocation that Alexander, the former bodyguard and friend of Tupac, had never tried, though he admits at this point in time, he could and would make better judgment calls.

"When you're hired to do a job, you know what that job description is and you do it to the best of your ability. Everything that I've ever done in my life, I've always been in charge. But with Tupac, working with the company Wright Way Security, which was hired by Death Row Records, [and] the owner of the company that you are working for gives you an order, you have to follow what he asks you to do," Alexander said in defending how and why he was left in the dark about the danger facing Tupac that fateful night in 1996. "It was pretty simple as to what we had to do, but I was not in control of Tupac, I did not control the schedule. Everything that was going on and around him in 1996, I was not made aware of that unless it was specifically told to me that I needed to look out for a certain incident. Over the years, I've taken a different position. Back then, what I thought about the record label and the security company is not the way I look at it today. We call that wisdom. Today, I see a completely different picture."

Alexander even points out a particular incident that - back then - he didn't give much thought to, but now feels was an important point leading up to the shooting death of the rapper. He told EUR's Lee Bailey that in 1996 Wright Way owner and Death Row interim pres Reggie Wright called him up to tell him about a man named Orlando Anderson and what happened in the Lakewood Mall.

"Four to five months later, Tupac gets into a fight with Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas," Alexander said. "That scenario then meant nothing to me. Now it looks to me as more of a scenario of the stage being set."

"The entire Death Row organization - and it's really come to light with the Suge Knight bankruptcy and with many of the current events that are going on - has really exposed that company to be very representative of the shell game," Bond said, likening the company's tactics to a three-card Monty game. "There was just division of information. No one had a clear picture of anything, and I think that was by design. It's really come out in the focus of the last three years of how scattered and how fragmented information was."

In addition to what Bond called "fragmented" and "partitioned" information, he mentioned how most of the people involved or key to the assassination or anyone who was close to Suge Knight and the Death Row organization is dead. However, though the film all but indicts Reggie Wright and Death Row as a whole, it stops short of naming Knight as a culprit as well.

"I think there is always an element of plausible deniability," Bond explained. "Leaders of any kind of organization involved in organized crime always had what was known as the back-door man who was responsible for keeping a low profile and making sure certain functionalities of the business happened while the figurehead could maintain that. That is one of the questions that we put up: Did Suge Knight have the knowledge?"

Bond continued that the film sets the stage for a call to action regarding the unsolved murder mystery. He and Alexander believe that revealing the Las Vegas Police Department's missteps and overlooked key information may bring a call to action on a number of levels, be it the powers overseeing the investigation or fans demanding that there be some justice.

You be the judge. See the DVD.

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