A Brooklyn inmate has confessed his involvement in the 1994 robbery and shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur, an assault commonly credited with inciting the deadly East Coast-West Coast rap feud that ultimately led to the deaths of Shakur and popular rapper Notorious B.I.G.
Dexter Issac, who is serving life in prison on unrelated murder and robbery charges, told AllHipHop.com in a June 15 statement that hip-hop mogul James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond paid him $2,500 to assault Shakur inside a Manhattan recording studio in November 1994.
Issac, 46, said he was allowed to keep all of the jewelry he stole from Shakur except a diamond ring Rosemond wanted for his then-girlfriend. The prisoner still has a chain he held onto after the assault as a memento, according to his statement.
“I’m not going to talk about my friend Biggie’s death or 2Pac’s death,” he wrote, “but I would like to give their mothers some closure. It’s about time that someone did, and I will do so at a different time.”
Issac released his confession the day before Tupac would have turned 40.
“It’s a flat out lie,” Rosemond’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman told The New York Daily News. “Dexter Isaac is not claiming this 17 years later to clear his conscience. He’s doing it because he’s told anybody who will listen he doesn’t want to die in prison. He has kids and wants to work off his sentence. He can’t be trusted.”
According to AllHipHop.com, Rosemond is currently on the run from federal officials over drug dealing allegations, but recently fingered Issac as a government informant.
Issac said he confessed to robbing Shakur because he is “plain tired of listening to lies.”
Neither Issac nor any other individual can be prosecuted for the assault at this point, because the statute of limitations has expired.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told the Daily News that detectives still plan to interview Isaac.
Shakur was shot five times but survived the 1994 attack after receiving treatment at a Manhattan hospital. Two years later, he was shot and killed in Las Vegas. The rapper had openly pinned his 1994 assault on those close to Notorious B.I.G., who was shot dead in Los Angeles in 1997. Both murders remain unsolved.