Tupac’s stepdad up for parole:

America

He made the FBI’s most wanted list and was convicted of leading a revolutionary group responsible for a trail of bloodshed, including the slayings of an armed guard and two New York police officers. But after serving half his prison sentence, Mutulu Shakur might soon be a free man.

The 65-year-old, stepfather to the late rapper Tupac Shakur, is eligible for mandatory parole after serving 30 years of the 60-year sentence he was given in 1988 for masterminding a string of deadly armed robberies in New York and Connecticut committed by a militant political group known as “The Family”.

His parole hearing is to take place this week at the federal penitentiary in Victorville, California, where he is serving his sentence, according to US Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr.

Although federal parole was abolished in 1987, it is still granted for inmates convicted before then. And under the rules in place at the time of his conviction, parole is mandatory for Shakur unless a commission finds he is likely to reoffend or has frequently violated prison rules.

The possibility that Shakur could walk free has outraged Michael Paige, whose father, a Brinks security guard, was killed in a $1.6 million holdup of an armored truck at a mall in suburban Rockland County, New York, on Oct 20, 1981.

He called it “incomprehensible” and “sickening”.

“That’s the going rate? Thirty years for at least three lives that were taken?” he said. “I was 16 years when he was killed by these animals. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my father”.

Less than an hour after Peter Paige was killed during the Brinks heist, two Nyack police officers, Waverly Brown and Sgt Edward O’Grady, were killed in an ambush after stopping a truck at a roadside checkpoint.

Shakur was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list after the heist. He remained on the run until he was arrested in Los Angeles in 1986. (AP)