In the adrenaline rush after a Mike Tyson prize fight in 1996, a black BMW carrying rapper Tupac Shakur stopped at a red light right on the Las Vegas Strip and wowed the women in the car next to him.
As Mr. Shakur hung out his passenger window, his friends in the Lexus behind him assumed he was inviting the women to his record label’s new nightclub, Club 662 – whose numerical name was a thinly disguised telephone code for “MOB.”
The women retreated and a white Cadillac took their place. A large, muscular arm emerged from the rear window and fired a barrage of shots from a .40-caliber Glock pistol into the BMW. Mr. Shakur was hit four times.
The driver of the BMW, Death Row Records impresario Marion Knight, better known as Suge, was struck by the gunfire. But he managed to take off, making a U-turn across a transit lane and driving the wounded Mr. Shakur in the opposite direction before stopping.
Malcolm Greenidge, a rapper and close friend of Mr. Shakur’s who had followed them in the Lexus, rushed out of the car to check on Mr. Shakur, he testified before a grand jury in Las Vegas this summer. Mr. Shakur seemed less concerned about his wounds than about Greenidge’s safety as armed police approached the chaotic crime scene, he recalled.
“Get on the ground, they’re going to shoot you,” Mr. Shakur told him, Mr. Greenidge testified. Mr. Shakur died less than a week later at age 25.
In the 27 years since, accounts of the events of September 7, 1996 have come in a confusing tangle of news reports, true-crime specials, street gossip, Internet innuendos and dubious self-mythologizing. The case went cold.
But prosecutors began filing charges last week against Duane Keith Davis, a former Compton gang leader known as Keffe D who has said publicly for years that he was in the white Cadillac when the fatal shots were fired. to establish the most precise narrative details yet about the chain of events that they believe led to Mr. Shakur’s death, one that is being tried in court.
While the broad outlines of Mr. Shakur’s killing and his possible motive have long been known, hundreds of pages of grand jury testimony reviewed by The New York Times – under oath and with surprisingly graphic descriptions for a decades-old case – provide new details about it , how hyperlocal disputes between warring gang factions led to an ultimately deadly rap beef that would change the course of hip-hop history.
The son of Black Panther parents and a former performing arts student turned hip-hop backup dancer, Mr. Shakur emerged in the early 1990s with a unique blend of introspective street poetry and a young man’s anger A breakthrough as a solo artist. A proud antihero whose popularity only increased as he became embroiled in violence and rivalries, Mr. Shakur transformed in death into a hip-hop icon and pop culture martyr.
On Wednesday, Mr. Davis appeared for the first time in Clark County District Court for a scheduled arraignment, which the judge postponed because Mr. Davis did not have an attorney present and said that his longtime attorney in California, Edi Faal, could not be there. In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Faal said that Mr. Davis, 60, planned to plead not guilty; He declined to discuss details of the case, saying he was in the process of getting Mr. Davis a lawyer in Nevada.
“As in all cases, I think we should allow things to play out in the courtroom,” Mr. Faal said.
Some of the new evidence challenges the conventional wisdom that has formed around the murder. While Mr. Davis had previously told law enforcement that the gun was fired by his nephew Orlando Anderson, who was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998, two witnesses shared their accounts with the grand jury, casting doubt on the widely believed representation emerged.
Those familiar with the case have reacted to news of Mr. Davis’ arrest with a mix of shock and relief.
Allen Hughes, who directed two of Mr. Shakur’s early music videos and worked with his estate on “Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,” a documentary series about the rapper and his mother released this year, said the family had each other asked if there would ever be any responsibility for his death.
“All these years we all knew what it was,” he said. “Just because law enforcement didn’t close the case doesn’t mean we felt like we didn’t know who the real culprits were.”
Now someone has been charged with his death. And Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police officer who began reinvestigating the murder in 2006, said: “Tupac Shakur’s murder will never again be considered an unsolved mystery.”
Brawls and retaliation
After his arrest and subsequent conviction for sexual abuse in 1993, Mr. Shakur’s music and public persona had taken on a darker side as he joined the gangster rap label Death Row Records and its leader Suge Knight, who made up his outstanding bail arranged appeal in the amount of 1.4 million US dollars.
While still awaiting verdict in the case, Mr. Shakur was ambushed, robbed and shot in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, an attack he later attributed to his former friend Notorious B.I.G. and subsidiaries of New York label Bad Boy Records, including Sean Combs, then known as Puff Daddy. (They denied any involvement and claimed his mocking song “Who Shot Ya?” was written before the incident.)
After Mr. Shakur responded with the angry, personal dissident “Hit ‘Em Up” in June 1996, the once-simmering competition between the hip-hop vanguard on the East and West coasts became a seething feud with each side needing support was sworn enemies in the gang underworld for protection and street credibility.
Those rising tensions began to boil over as players from both sides prepared to travel to Las Vegas to watch Mr. Tyson fight Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.
Shortly before the fight, a brawl at the Lakewood Mall in Southern California sparked a series of retaliations.
Denvonta Lee, who said he was a member of the South Side Crips from Compton, told the grand jury in Las Vegas this summer that Mr. Davis – who described himself as the local Crip group’s “five-star general” – was a Local football player He paid $4,000 to buy clothes before he went to college and asked other gang members to accompany him to the mall.
There, the group of young Crips clashed with a death row-affiliated group of Mob Piru Bloods, their nearby rivals, leading to a dispute over a death row chain. “It’s like taking someone’s crown away,” Mr. Lee testified. “It means something.” Within 24 hours, “a war” had broken out on site, he added. “There were shootings everywhere,” he said.
One of the participants in the mall brawl was Orlando Anderson, a nephew of Mr. Davis and known as Baby Lane, according to testimony. In September of that year, Mr. Anderson traveled to Las Vegas with his uncle and other Crips for a weekend of boxing, gambling and partying.
The heavyweight fight ended in less than two minutes with a first-round knockout of Tyson. Some ticket holders didn’t even make it to their seats before the event was over.
As those gathered planned their next steps for the evening, Mr. Anderson, brushing aside the need for support, found himself alone near the MGM hotel elevators and directly in front of Mr. Shakur and his entourage of Bloods, including the same man, whose death The shopping center in California had been attacked.
In a melee caught on surveillance cameras around 9 p.m. that evening, the group began punching and kicking Mr. Anderson, who refused to cooperate with police and hotel security after his attackers dispersed.
Now it was Mr. Anderson who wanted revenge. “He didn’t come back to Compton without something being done,” Lee told the grand jury.
A deadly encounter
Mr. Davis, a successful drug dealer and “shot caller” for the Crips at the time of Mr. Shakur’s death, wrote in his 2019 memoir “Compton Street Legend” that he had received a Glock pistol the night of the shooting from a drug associate Harlem before heading off with Mr. Anderson to find Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight.
A childhood friend of Mr. Knight – the two played Pop Warner football together – Mr. Davis was enmeshed in the growing gangster rap nightlife in the 1990s, but his relationship with Death Row soured as the label became increasingly involved Blood was associated with him. Mr. Davis instead allied himself with their national rival Bad Boy and made his Crip soldiers available as West Coast security guards for the label’s artists and executives in exchange for access to concerts and parties.
After a failed stakeout by Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight at Club 662, the white Cadillac in which Mr. Davis and Mr. Anderson were riding happened upon Mr. Shakur’s BMW and spotted him as he leaned out the passenger side.
“If Pac hadn’t been hanging out the window, we would never have seen her,” Mr. Davis wrote. “Like two rams clutching horns, Suge and I looked each other straight in the eye.”
According to witness statements and law enforcement reports, Terrence Brown was driving the white Cadillac that night; Mr. Davis was in the passenger seat, with Mr. Anderson behind him and Deandrae Smith, known as Big Dre, also in the back. (Mr. Davis is the only person in the vehicle still alive, police said.)
In describing the shooting, Mr. Davis wrote in his memoirs that he threw the Glock into the back seat before the encounter at the traffic light. While he has sometimes refused to say who did the shooting that night, he said in interviews with police officials about 15 years ago that it was Mr. Anderson.
However, new witness statements in the case suggest a different version of events.
Mr. Lee, the grand jury witness, was Mr. Smith’s roommate at the time and told the court in July that Mr. Smith had then admitted to firing the shots that killed Mr. Shakur and injured Mr. Knight. “Orlando didn’t have a clear shot,” he said, adding: “Dre said, ‘Hey, give me the gun,’ got the gun, boom, did his thing.”
However, speculation subsequently spread in Compton and beyond that Mr. Anderson had pulled the trigger in retaliation for his beating at the MGM. Mr. Smith left the “glory” to Mr. Anderson, Mr. Lee testified. “He didn’t want to take the credit for Orlando.”
The indictment against Mr. Davis does not identify the shooter, but states that Mr. Davis provided the weapon to Mr. Smith “and/or” Mr. Anderson “with the intent that the said co-conspirators commit the said crime.” Mr. Kading , the former Los Angeles detective, said in an interview that he believes that “the key evidence is Keffe D’s own admissions in his interviews with law enforcement that he gave the gun to Orlando Anderson and that Orlando Anderson pulled the trigger.” “
Mr. Anderson, his friend said, often shied away from claiming murder. “‘You’re all crazy, man, don’t believe everything you hear,'” Mr. Lee recalled saying.
Share his story
Immediately after the killing, as a similar gang war broke out in Compton, police there used what Robert Ladd, a former Compton Police Department detective, described to the grand jury as a “massive, multi-gang search warrant” to arrest known gang members to try to curb the violence on the streets and the searches of the homes of Mr. Davis and the others from the white Cadillac.
However, the initial investigation stalled as the police blamed the witnesses’ lack of cooperation. It was revived in 2006 when the Los Angeles Police Department created a task force to investigate the still-unsolved 1997 murder of the notorious B.I.G., long believed to be linked to Mr. Shakur’s death.
During that investigation, Mr. Kading, the Los Angeles police officer, persuaded Mr. Davis to speak with him after he threatened to prosecute him for drug trafficking.
In 2008, Mr. Davis agreed to a so-called proffer agreement in which Mr. Kading promised not to prosecute Mr. Davis based on what he had told him about Tupac and Biggie as long as nothing he said was proven to be a lie.
Mr. Kading recorded Mr. Davis’ interview, and after he retired from the police force, the detective used the contents of the confession in a 2011 book called “Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac.” Shakur Murder Investigations.” In 2015, the recording was included in a documentary based on the book.
Mr. Davis was irritated by Mr. Kading’s revelations. After recovering from colon cancer, he was eager to tell his story and began speaking publicly about the case. It was a risky move. Although Mr. Davis – who has spent a quarter of his life in prison, including for drug trafficking – would have been protected from prosecution for what he told Mr. Kading during their meeting, his subsequent public disclosures would not be protected, legal experts said.
Mr. Davis gave his first public interview on the subject of Mr. Shakur’s death for a 2018 documentary series called “Death Row Chronicles.”
“He tried to word things carefully enough to walk a tightrope between acknowledgment and non-arrest,” said Mike Dorsey, the director of “Murder Rap,” who was a consultant on “Death Row Chronicles.” He said Mr. Davis arrived with a lawyer.
After the series aired without any charges being filed, Mr. Davis wrote about the case in his memoirs; His interviews on the topic, including with prominent YouTubers, have become “more and more relaxed,” Mr. Dorsey said.
Police officers and prosecutors in Las Vegas closely watched Mr. Davis’ interviews.
“Since 2019, he has appeared at least eight times to promote this book and has repeated various versions of these events, all of which he admits that he is in fact the person who ordered Mr. Shakur’s death,” Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor involved in the case, he said in court on Friday.
In his memoirs, Mr. Davis was at times more lenient toward Mr. Shakur and his family, writing that he had a “deep sense of remorse” for the pain his death caused.
Still, he remained adamant that revenge was necessary for the beating of his nephew, even going so far as to say that the murder earned “some punches” from some of the Crips involved.
“But it attracted too much attention,” Mr. Davis continued, “and brought us under scrutiny from law enforcement who wouldn’t stop and ended up bringing us down. “It was a great loss for everyone involved.”
Lynnette Curtis contributed reporting from Las Vegas.