Tupac Shakur’s Emotional Letter From Jail Selling for $225K

TuPac in 1993

A personal letter handwritten by hip-hop star Tupac Shakur while he was locked up on sexual assault charges shortly before he was killed is going up for sale for $225,000.

The notorious rapper had declared in a 1995 jailhouse interview — after surviving a shootout and being locked up on rape charges in New York’s Clinton Correctional Facility — that he was changing his ways, exclaiming, “Thug Life to me is dead. If it’s real, then let somebody else represent it, because I’m tired of it.”

And while in jail — detoxing and reportedly soaking up books by Niccolò Machiavelli and Sun Tzu — he even cooked up his own street philosophy, which he described to a staffer at his record label, Death Row Records.

“Here is what my heart says at this time. It’s long but it’s true. Use it as u see fit,” he wrote in a heady, rambling missive to Nina Bhadreshwar, who worked for Death Row Records and was editor of Death Row Uncut magazine as well as her own publication, the Real State. “I am not granting this information to any other publication, not even Time & Rolling Stone so please represent it as it is layed. I trust u.”

The rapper — who had his “Thug Life” motto tattooed across his stomach — wrote that while in withdrawal from booze and drugs in jail, “the seeds planted . . . before me showed me the path to the next level.”

“Many never survive the next level of Thug Life . . . They become addicted to death. A True Boss Playa knows when to advance . . . U must play the game, not let the game play u,” he said of starting a new chapter. “A regular Playa plays women . . . a Boss Playa plays life. A Boss Playa is a thinker, a leader, a builder, a moneymaker, a souljah, a teacher and most of all, a Man! I want all my homiez to know there is another level.”

Shakur was killed in 1996, less than a year after his release.

Bhadreshwar has said of the letter, being sold by Moments in Time, “He enclosed a five-page essay on his view of the rite of passage of a young black male in America. And that was the beginning of our real correspondence.”