He spoke of being constantly told what to do and when to do it by guards who could speak to him any way they wanted.
“And you can die here,” Tupac said.
He reported that somebody had been killed in the prison just a few days before.
“Do not to come to jail,” Tupac said. “Jail is not the spot.”
On another day, Fama was getting a visit from his family when he looked over to see Tupac was having a visit from the hulking Marion “Suge” Knight, then head of Death Row Records.
“He’s there with Suge,” Fama recalls. “Suge’s like two people. He’s tremendous.”
Knight offered to post $1.4 million to bail out Tupac pending an appeal. Tupac needed only sign a three-page handwritten recording contract. He did so on September 16, 1995.
“I know I’m selling my soul to the devil,” Tupac reportedly said.
On October 9, Fama was in the yard while Tupac was on one of the outdoor pay phones. He got off and turned to Fama.
“Between you and I, I’m making bail,” Tupac said, by Fama’s recollection. “Keep it on the QT. I’m out of here tomorrow.”
Immediately after breakfast the following morning, Tupac departed.
“Take care of yourself,” Fama told him before he left. “Keep your head up.”
“If you need anything, let me know,” Tupac supposedly said.
Tupac left all his personal items behind in his cell, as if he did not want anything that he would associate with his eight months in prison.
“He didn’t take anything,” Fama recalls. “He just walked away.”
A white stretch limousine took Tupac off to a private plane that awaited at the local airport. Fama understood that the rapper might have been willing to make a deal with the devil himself to get out of prison, to sell his soul so as to save his spirit.
“I guess sometimes you got to do it,” Fama says.
Eleven months later, in September 1996, Fama heard talk that Tupac had been shot and killed while riding in a car with Knight in Las Vegas.
“I didn’t believe it at first,” Fama says. “I thought it just was a publicity stunt.”
He then saw a news report.
“This guy really is dead,” Fama told himself. “You’re with somebody and then…”
Fama continued serving his time and spoke with The Daily Beast last week as the 25th anniversary of Hawkins’s murder approached. Fama continued to insist he was not the gunman.
“I’m not saying I wasn’t there,” Fama said. “I’m just saying I didn’t shoot the guy.”
He noted that that the prosecution’s prime witnesses had included a jailhouse informant who had testified to hearing so many supposed confessions that he was known as the Pope of Rikers Island.
Fama said the prosecution’s main witness had recanted on videotape immediately after testifying, but the judge had refused to admit it. Fama now has a private investigator who says he is actively working the case.
Fama noted that his first parole hearing is scheduled for the end of 2021. He will then have to decide whether to continue insisting upon his innocence, which the board is sure to interpret as a lack of remorse.
“You got to make a decision,” Fama said. “They don’t want to hear you didn’t do nothing.”
Fama also spoke to The Daily Beast of his friendship with Tupac Shakur, which had proved to be more unlikely than he knew with the posthumous publication of a book of poems that the rapper had written at least four years before he went to prison. One of poems is titled “For Mrs. Hawkins” and is “in memory of Yusuf Hawkins.”
“This poem is addressed 2 Mrs. Hawkins
who lost her son 2 a racist society
I’m not out 2 offend the positive souls
only the racist dogs who lied 2 me
An American culture plagued with nights
like the night Yusuf was killed
if it were reversed it would be the work
of a savage but this white killer was just strong-willed
But Mrs. Hawkins as sure as I’m a Panther
with the blood of Malcolm in my veins
America will never rest
if Yusuf dies in vain!”
Tupac must have been more surprised than anybody that he could possibly have become friends with the white killer from his poem.
Tupac often said he loved Shakespeare’s complexities. Maybe he himself possessed such intricate vision that he could play football with Joey Fama and not for a moment forget young Hawkins, who had lain dying with that Snickers bar in his hand, blinking twice to say he did not know why he had been shot.
