Inmate Confesses to 1994 Robbery of Tupac Shakur
Man has confessed to robbing Shakur in a 1994 incident where rapper was shot.
June 16, 2011— -- A convicted murderer serving a life sentence in a Brooklyn, N.Y., prison claims he robbed Tupac Shakur in a 1994 incident where the late rapper was shot five times, insisting that a hip hop mogul hired him for the job.
Dexter Isaac is listed as the author of a confessional letter to Allhiphop.com in which he claims that he was hired by entertainment mogul James "Jimmy Henchman" Rosemond to carry out the November 1994 robbery in front of New York's Quad Studio. Isaac is currently serving a life sentence for an unrelated crime.
During the robbery, Tupac was shot, but Isaac didn't indicate who actually pulled the trigger.
"He gave me $2,500, plus all the jewelry I took, except for one ring, which he wanted for himself. It was the biggest of the two diamond rings that we took. He said he wanted to put the stone in a new setting for his girlfriend at the time, Cynthia Ried. I still have as proof the chain that we took that night in the robbery," Isaac wrote in the statement.
Isaac's allegations against Rosemond -- who manages the careers Mike Tyson and Sean Kingston through his Czar Entertainment -- come after Rosemond accused him of being a government informant.
Claiming that he has kept Rosemond's secret for years, in the letter, Isaac accuses Rosemond of being the actual informant, stating that he has documents proving that Rosemond aided the government to arrest his friends in order to keep him out of prison.
In the letter, Isaac also insinuates that he has further information regarding Shakur's unsolved 1996 murder and the death or rapper Christopher Wallace, better known as The Notorious B.I.G., in 1997. He also implies that Sean "P Diddy" Combs is in cahoots with Rosemond in some capacity.
"Now I'm not going to talk about my friend Biggie's death or 2Pac's death, but I would like to give their mothers some closure," it reads. "It's about time that some one did, and I will do so at a different time," Isaac says in the letter. "Jimmy, you and Puffy like to come off all innocent-like, but as the saying goes: You can't fool some of the people of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
The 1994 robbery and shooting – in which Shakur was shot five times, twice in the head -- is widely cited as an instigating event in the long-running rivalry between Shakur and Wallace throughout the mid1990s. Shakur recovered from the 1994 shooting. In an interview with Vibe magazine in April of 1995, Shakur stated that he believed that Uptown Records' founder Andre Harrell, Sean Combs, and Wallace -- who were all inside the Quad Studio building at the time -- had prior knowledge of the robbery.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told the Associated Press that the department is looking into the allhiphop.com posting, and if it is determined to be legitimately from Isaac, they will seek to interview him.
Rosemond's lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, said Isaac's confession is merely a ploy to get out of a life sentence for a crime unreleated to the Tupac incident.
"All of a sudden, 17 years later, he's not looking to clear his conscience," Lichtman told ABCNews.com. "He's looking to get out of a life sentence for a murder he committed that has nothing to do with this."