They are graying and a bit world-weary now as they file into a courtroom in Las Vegas.
More than three decades ago, they were young men at the center of a violent gang war that took many lives, notably that of rapper Tupac Shakur.
They were the lucky ones, surviving the bloodshed.
But they are now reliving those dark times as the rapper’s murder trial lays bare the complex relationships and feud between the Crips and Bloods and between East Coast and West Coast rappers in the early 1990s.
Shakur’s killing on the Las Vegas Strip in 1996 blew these tensions wide open, though the case remained unsolved for decades. Now, Las Vegas prosecutors are trying a longtime Compton gang leader, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, in the murder and using the words of both him and other associates to build their case.
“Any time you deal with gang, the gang life, it is going to be violence at any given time,” testified James McDonald, a.k.a. Mob James, a onetime associate of Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight, who was in the same car as Shakur when the rapper was killed.
Prosecutors accuse Davis of orchestrating the murder and are using his past statements to build their case. He denies the charge.
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 affiliated with Death Row.
The rapper was killed after a violent confrontation at a Mike Tyson fight earlier that night in Las Vegas. Clark County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Binu Palal showed video of Shakur’s entourage attacking Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson. Travon Lane, a Mob Piru member, had spotted Anderson in the MGM Grand hotel lobby. Months earlier, Anderson stole Lane’s Death Row Records chain in a Lakewood mall during an attack.
Shakur’s killing set off a gang war on the streets of Compton in which numerous people were killed. In just the first few weeks, three people were dead and 10 were wounded, including a young girl.
“We all fell victim to it because we allowed ourselves to be part of the BS,” McDonald testified.
But McDonald said he did not want to do Davis harm. “I don’t want to send him to prison. Even though we don’t like each other,” McDonald said, pointing at a surly-faced Davis.
“I changed my life. I’m raising my grandkids, teaching them never to be like their Pawpaw, and here I am, explaining to people what I used to be, and I’m not proud of that, I’m not proud of that at all,” McDonald said. “You’re asking me questions that can hurt him, and like I told them, I’m trying to avoid [answering] the questions.”
Prosecutors treated McDonald as a hostile witness. While he was not an eyewitness to the shooting itself, he offered context about the feuds and rivalries that led up to it.
“We knew we were going to have neighborhood issues,” he said. “It’s time to go and protect your home front. Like the other side was being prepared and was prepared to do things because Orlando got beat up in there, and that’s something that you don’t tolerate.”
Jurors last week heard Davis’ words through a 2008 interview with an LAPD federal task force investigating the murder of Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, and a 2009 Las Vegas homicide detective.
In 2008, Davis, facing a potential life sentence for PCP sales, told LAPD detectives he obtained the gun used to kill Shakur. His nephew pulled the trigger, he said, but he would have gladly done it had he been sitting on other side of the car.
In a 2009 interview with a Las Vegas Metro homicide detective, Davis said he had warned young gang members to stop bragging “we killed Tupac.” He warned that charges for a homicide can come anytime, saying: “Murder is never over.”
Reggie Wright Jr., Death Row’s former security chief and a retired Compton police officer, testified he assigned two men to Shakur’s security. At the Soul Train Music Awards in May 1996, Wright said, Knight and Shakur were in a Hummer when Shakur got into a confrontation with rapper Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.
“Mr. Shakur saw Christopher Wallace became enraged and began yelling,” he said. “A confrontation between Biggie and Mr. Shakur got to the point where one of their guys brandished a weapon and then that’s when I pulled my firearm.”
Wright spoke to jurors from a mobility scooter as a result, he told them, of COVID.
Wright testified that after the shooting he called his father, Reggie Wright Sr., a Compton police lieutenant who led the gang unit, several times that night using his cellphone.
Wright said he relayed that people were telling him that Shakur and Knight had gotten into a fight at MGM with South Side Compton Crips. “It’s gonna be trouble back in Compton,” he said he told his father.
Michael Sanft, Davis’ defense attorney, told jurors in opening statements there would be no evidence linking his client to the shooting. Sanft noted that previous investigations did not take his client’s statements seriously because they were not credible.
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