Did the sniper do jail-time before? Big hip-hop fan ?
http://comp.uark.edu/~tsweden/5per.html
Among the commercially successful and critically hailed rappers who belong to the Nation of Gods and Earths are: Rakim (Allah) of Eric B and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Poor Righteous Teachers, Busta Rhymes, Leaders of the New School, The Guru of the group Gangstarr, Pete Rock and CL Smooth, and Mobb Deep (whose latest release entered the Billboard charts at #6 on December 1, 1996). All members of the group, Wu Tang Clan, belong to the Five Percent Nation, including those whose solo work has sold in the millions: Method Man, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, and most recently, Ghost Face Killer, whose album Ironman charted at #2 in November [sales?]). The Grammy Award-winning Digable Planets are also part of the Five Percent orbit,6 and the Digables' second release Blowout Comb is loaded with Five-Percent references. In fact, many more noted rappers belong to Five Percent Nation than to Minister Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (NOI).
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The Five Percent Nation was founded by Clarence 13X, who joined the NOI Temple No. 7 in Harlem in the early 1950s (when it was led by Malcolm X) and became a lieutenant in the Fruit of Islam (the NOI security force) and a student minister. In the early sixties Clarence began to question the NOI doctrine that God had appeared in Detroit in 1930 in the person of Master Farad Muhammad (pronounced Fa-rád). (It was Farad who passed on his teachings to his messenger, Elijah Muhammad.) Clarence 13X reportedly began to doubt that Farad was God, since the NOI taught that the Original (Black) Man was Allah (see Lincoln 1994:69), and Farad looked white (see photo in ???). (Farad, as we will discuss later, was probably an Arab). Clarence 13X began to teach that the black man collectively was God. He was reprimanded in 1963, left the NOI along with a few followers, changed his name from Clarence 13X to Allah, and began preaching to the youth on the streets of Harlem.