At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about the intersection of Flamingo and Kovac in Las Vegas. It’s an area with very little foot traffic, about half a mile from the Strip, the most popular area of the gambling capital of the United States. Those who wander these corners are generally lost tourists or casino workers accustomed to Sin City’s less-trodden back streets. A towering street lamp stands out from the cityscape, covered in hundreds of inscriptions. These are farewell messages to Tupac Shakur, the rap legend who died in a drive-by shooting on this nondescript stretch of road in 1996.
The place looks deserted today. “It’s not an official monument and it’s not in good condition, but people created it,” said Isaiah, a security guard guarding a construction site in front of the post. Its base is covered in cigarette butts and trash, but Isaiah says fans leave offerings there every year on Sept. 13, the day the rapper died in a Las Vegas hospital, six days after he was shot from a white Cadillac , while waiting at a traffic light. The monument itself was deserted in late September, just days after the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) made the first and only arrest of a suspect involved in the hip-hop artist’s murder, nearly three decades after the crime.
The front page of the Daily News, September 14, 1996. New York Daily News Archive
Duane “Keefe D” Davis, 60, was arrested the morning of Sept. 29 in Henderson, a quiet neighborhood just off the chaotic Las Vegas Strip. Images released by LVMPD show the suspect did not resist. Davis, a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips street gang, had only his phone and a bottle of water with him when he was arrested. Minutes later, as he waited in a patrol car outside the Metro Police building, an officer asked him why he had been stopped. “For the biggest case in the history of Las Vegas,” he reportedly replied.
Davis’ name was on the list of subjects of interest in this case for more than two decades. Only with the arrival of a new sheriff, Kevin McMahill, could the investigation get underway. The putative solution to one of rap’s most famous mysteries also came with a publishing development: Davis’ 2019 memoir, Compton Street Legend, in which he sought to expand his profile as a street soldier for Los Angeles gangs and their role in the gangs’ rise to sharpen Death Row Records and the East-West conflict that claimed the lives of the Notorious BIG and Tupac. The book proved instrumental in the police’s investigation of the case.
Davis, the youngest of 12 children, describes in the book how his family settled in Compton in the mid-1960s by buying a house after his father got lucky at a casino in Tijuana. His childhood friends included Marion “Suge” Knight, later the founder of Death Row Records and whose name was linked to Davis’s because of the events of September 1996. Davis joined the Crips in 1971 in a neighborhood that also brought rappers like Eazy E, Dr. Dre and Coolio stand out. The drug trade landed Davis in prison in the mid-1980s, where he became a hardened criminal, he says.
Davis claims to have been the passenger in the white Cadillac from which the bullets were fired that fatally wounded Tupac. On the night of September 7, 1996, tension in Las Vegas reached its peak. The city, the boxing capital of the world, was packed with gang members who had come to watch Mike Tyson fight. He defeated Bruce Seldon in the first round and the crowd wanted more. In the lobby of the MGM Grand Las Vegas, a brawl broke out between Suge Knight and his associates, who were associated with the Piru Bloods mob, bitter rivals of the Crips. Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Davis’ nephew, was severely beaten, prompting Keefe D and his crew to vow revenge.
The streets of Las Vegas offered them an opportunity two and a half hours later at a red light. Davis, Anderson, Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown and DeAndre “Big Dre” Smith, all in the Cadillac, came across Tupac and Suge Knight’s black BMW. “The next few seconds passed very quickly,” Davis writes. “Tupac made an erratic movement and began reaching under his seat […] and then the fireworks started. “One of my guys from behind grabbed the Glock and started fighting back.” Shakur was hit twice in the chest and died a week later.
Duane Davis at his arraignment at the Regional Justice Center in Las Vegas in connection with the murder of Tupac Shakur.POOL (via Portal)
Police failures
The murder sent shockwaves across the West Coast, one of the major hubs of gangster rap. Days later, Compton police received calls from informants who claimed to have seen Orlando Anderson on the street with a semi-automatic Glock, the same model as the murder weapon. The crime sparked ten days of violence in Compton, with retaliatory attacks between Crips and Bloods leaving three dead and a dozen injured.
A group of Compton detectives tasked with fighting gangs reported the findings to LVMPD. “We told Vegas at the time that we thought the Southside Crips were responsible for the murder and that Orlando was the shooter,” one of those detectives, Bobby Ladd, told the Los Angeles Times in 2002. The Nevada agents did not respond on the information, which led to frustration among California investigators.
Compton officials were aware of the difficulty of investigating crimes committed by gang members. The laws of the street require a code of silence. But the Las Vegas investigation was criticized because those responsible refused to follow the most obvious principles. One of them was the fight at the MGM Grand. “Investigators have no reason to believe that the altercation had any connection to the shooting,” Homicide Commander Kevin Manning said in 1996.
It was the California investigators who, after reviewing security camera footage from the casino, confirmed that the man from Knight’s entourage had defeated Orlando Anderson. The footage showed that he had a brief exchange with Tupac. Las Vegas officials did not request video footage to follow Anderson’s footsteps along the Strip after the attacks, even though it was an area with numerous surveillance devices. Footage from that night was deleted seven days later. The officers were also unable to locate the white Cadillac that had been rented.
Anderson died in a shooting in Compton in 1998. During his lifetime he always denied being the shooter. The other passengers in the car that night have also died: Big Dre died in 2004 and Bubble Up, who was driving the Cadillac, was killed in a shooting in Compton in 2015. Davis is the only survivor and his memories of that night could end his days at large if he is found guilty of Tupac’s murder. “Only one thing is certain in the life of a gangster,” he wrote in his book. “You know that what you have done will come for you; “You don’t know when, but you have no doubt it will come back.”
Suge Knight: “Orlando wasn’t the shooter”
Suge Knight was another witness to the events of September 7, 1996. The Death Row Records founder has been in prison since 2018, serving a 28-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter, unrelated to the death of Tupac Shakur. From prison, the businessman and self-proclaimed gangster told TMZ that he was surprised by Davis’ arrest.
“I can tell you this: I never had anything bad to say about Orlando because he wasn’t the shooter. It wasn’t Anderson, so that’s all I have to say about that role,” Knight said. Anderson testified on his behalf during his 2018 trial.
Knight has said he is not interested in testifying in the Davis trial. His lack of cooperation with authorities is not new. Since 1996, he has publicly stated that he would never tell the police who the murderer was. “I’m not going to go on the witness stand and testify about anyone. “For what?”
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