Negative. With the information we’ve found/verified these last 10 + years, this actually WAS closer to an ‘east coast west coast beef’ than it was just biggie vs pac.
There is basically 3 stages to this .
First Stage: in real time, it was east coast-west coast, it’s a global war, you must chose! It was hyped up recklessly
2nd stage: after they died and until a few years ago, everybody realizes the part the media hype played. The media made this war. It was just Pac vs Big and *the media* hyped it up.
3rd stage: now that more people talk and looking thru an adult lens, it was bigger than pac and big. And it all starts with this very thread. Bc of Suge blaming Puff for Jake, Puff was scared for his life hired Crips. That led to all the fukkery
So while it isn’t LITERAL east vs west, ok what would we call it? ‘A bicoastal gang war’. I mean that’s a lot closer to ‘east coast west coast beef’ than just ‘pac vs biggie’. You even have bicoastal ‘battles’ in the war, like dog pound getting shot when they were in NY, and Puff’s homie gettin tied up and tortured in LA for Puff’s address
Didn’t even mention that Zip was one of the plugs for Crips dope out west. Or that Gene deal got advance knowledge of Big being hit, from a NY OG Mecca Audio, while Mecca was locked up in Colorado. So this was touching the prisons too. What was happening out west was effecting things on the east and vice versa. This was no small petty beef. And it’s the other way around everyone else wasn’t the pawn; Pac and biggie were the pawns.
That's a good breakdown. Bi coastal gang feud plus music industry, it's something like that. Young music execs and their affiliates. It's not an easy thing for a lot of people to understand. They were all intertwined through money, music, industry, neighborhood and gang ties, drug trafficking, the circuit of parties and industry events.
Having been in childhood feuds, with violence, beatdowns, shootouts, they kind of resemble this. You have kind of leaders in a crew circle of friends, and they get into it with leaders/most visible person in the other crew for whatever reason, a girl, jealousy, money, whatever -----then by extension all the friends are involved, plus the people the friends get to help, other crews of often more violent criminal element.
By the time there's been killings, no one even remembers exactly why or where it started, and how it got to that point. And each person, if asked, (like we saw on these damn youtubes) would have a different memory of why it unfolded. The one I am personally thinking of, I truly can't remember why we were going at it, but I think it's almost like seeing two sides of the same coin, reflected at you, with some minor differences. Which is why the Puff/Suge thing, they were the same people, essentially. Powerbrokers and young execs/leaders vs their doubles.
Suge, Harry O, Jake Robles, Death Row artists and their entourages and circles of gangsters, plus MOB
Puff, BIG, ZIP, Jimmy Henchmen, and Haitian Jack other Harlem OG's, Wolf and his guys Bad Boy artists plus their circles, plus SSCC, Keefe, Orlando, and all them
and small thing but ZIP bought PCP from the Southsiders, and Keefe sold cocaine to the eastcoast crews. Zip was a buyer. Drugs move east, and money west.