Nearly 30 years after Tupac Shakur was gunned down near the Las Vegas Strip in a killing that rocked the rap world, the trial of the man prosecutors allege did everything but pull the trigger got underway Monday with new revelations.
Nevada prosecutors allege Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a one-time Compton gang member, killed Shakur as revenge for an attack on his nephew hours earlier and are using Davis’ own words in interviews and a book he co-authored as evidence.
In opening statements, prosecutors said an ugly gang rivalry on the streets of Compton led to the slaying of Shakur, a famed rapper and actor, who died six days after he was shot.
The Sept. 7, 1996, shooting, they said, was rooted in a war between Southside Crips-Burris Street, led by Davis, and Mob Piru, a gang long associated with Death Row Records. Shakur was closely associated with Death Row, and the record company’s boss, Marion “Suge” Knight, was inside his car the night he was attacked.
The rivalry grew after the Southside Crips became the West Coast security for Sean “Diddy” Combs’ record label, prosecutors said.
Clark County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Binu Palal said that bad blood came to a head at a Mike Tyson fight that night in Las Vegas. He showed video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’ nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. Lane, a Mob Piru, had spotted Anderson in the MGM Grand hotel lobby. Months earlier, Anderson stole Lane’s Death Row Records chain in the Lakewood Mall during an attack.
“Let’s be clear, Duane Davis did not pull the trigger. But he did plan the shooting in retaliation of the beating of his nephew,” Palal said. “Remarkably, you will learn that from Duane Davis himself.”
Palai noted that Shakur’s shooting was followed by numerous murders in Compton, including that of an 11-year-old girl.
“In this world, silence means survival,” Palal said. “The one person who has had a hard time being silent is Duane Davis.”
The prosecutor played parts of an interview with a Los Angeles Police Department federal task force in 2008 where Davis acknowledged his role in the rapper’s fatal shooting. They also cited other interviews as well as his own memoir.
The prosecutor said Davis got the gun from Eric Zip Martin, an East Coast drug dealer associated then with Combs’ Bad Boy Entertainment.
“He admits putting the gun he obtained that night in the back seat of the vehicle so the shooters could shoot,” the prosecutor said. “You will learn that Duane Davis got the gun … you will learn that he got into a white Cadillac. You will learn when the opportunity presented itself for retribution, Duane Davis made sure that the shooter was armed and ready to execute their revenge.”
Palal said Davis and his crew set out in search of Knight and Shakur. In multiple accounts, including in his book “Compton Street Legend,” Davis wrote that they spotted the Death Row caravan stopped at a red light, with Shakur waving to female fans while hanging out of the BMW window.
“Tupac, he gave himself away,” Davis said in the recording played in court. “Otherwise, they would’ve got away.”
Davis was arrested in 2023 and indicted for masterminding the killing and providing the gun.
Michael Sanft, Davis’s defense attorney, told jurors there will be no evidence linking his client to the shooting. “There are no facts to point to Keffe — not one,” he said. “You’re going to hear about this over and over again.”
Sanft recounted decades of probes and noted that prior investigations did not take his client’s statements seriously because they were not credible. “He treats that book like it’s fact,” Sanft said of a lead detective in the case. The defense attorney, in an unusual move, repeatedly undermined his own client’s credibility.
Sanft portrayed Las Vegas police as incompetent, with lost records, and the LAPD and then Compton police as corrupt. “What facts do they have to put Keffe D in a car in 1996? When you look at the video in 1996, do you see Keffe D?’ he added, referencing the lobby beating.
Sanft said Death Row’s security chief was Reggie Wright Jr., a felon and former Compton police officer whose father led the Compton police gang unit. He said the former cop was not with Knight and ordered his security team not to carry firearms. The defense lawyer cast Davis’ memoir as fiction and said there was no evidence his client was in Las Vegas.
The prosecutor, however, told jurors that Davis, from 1998 to 2023, made several incriminating statements and, in 1998, admitted to the FBI to being in Las Vegas during the murder.
Davis, according to prosecutors, told investigators during a secret meeting he “was mad about Orlando Anderson’s beating” and he was the boss who got the firearm and was in the white Cadillac. When LAPD detective, Greg Kading, who arranged the secret proffer and led the task force, left policing and later published a book revealing Davis’ role, it made Davis want to go public, according to the prosecution.
“Greg Kading is profiting off Duane Davis’s life story,” Palal said. By the time the book was released, the others who were allegedly in the car the night of the shooting were dead. Anderson has been murdered and Smith has passed away. In 2019, after a series of interviews, Davis published his own book, which, full of bravado, gave a similar account of Shakur’s killing as that of the federal task force. The prosecutor then played an interview from the time of the book’s release, where Davis justified his actions.
The first witness, Garry Dale, a Las Vegas Metro police officer, said he saw Shakur pulled out of the car with gunshot wounds and rode in the ambulance with him.
Dale testified he asked Shakur who shot him and the rapper replied, “‘No, we’ll take care of it,’” Dale said. “I couldn’t get him to talk any further.”
Ingrid Stokes, one of four women in a car that had been following Shakur that night testified that she freaked out and screamed then fled the scene, telling police she “didn’t see anything” because “snitches get stitches.”
A third witness who testified Monday, former Las Vegas Metro Det. Brent Becker, testified he saw interviewed Knight about the beating in the MGM Grand lobby, and Knight said he basically “didn’t know anything.” By 1997, detectives suspected taht Davis was in the Cadillac that opened fire on Shakur, he testified.
Davis, now 63, has pleaded not guilty to murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. In recent weeks, he’s denied being in the Cadillac or Las Vegas that night and, in interviews with Las Vegas TV stations, blamed a former head of Death Row Records security.
“I had nothing to do with nobody’s murder,” he told interviewers.
Prosecutors are expected to call witnesses to support Davis’s claims from over the years. Davis’ lawyers will seek to portray him as a fabricator — his bragging is all fiction. Davis has done the same with Las Vegas reporters.
“I did not write the book; a ghostwriter wrote that book,” Davis said in a recent jailhouse interview. “I was trying to make my family some money.”
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