Greg Kading paced the floor of his Southern California living room Monday, a bottle of champagne at the ready, as he waited for a courtroom livestream to carry the verdict in the Tupac Shakur murder trial. The former Los Angeles police detective led a task force that investigated the unsolved killings of Shakur and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, and he’s widely credited with helping crack the decades-old Shakur case.
When jurors returned after just three hours and convicted former Compton gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis of first-degree murder in the 1996 drive-by shooting of Shakur, Kading popped the cork with his wife and adult son. They “polished off the whole bottle” in celebration, Kading tells Rolling Stone.
“I was really kind of surprised, shocked even, that it came back that quickly,” Kading says, speaking by phone. “When they gave the guilty verdict, I was just like, finally, yes. [The jurors] really got it. They were able to see through all the smoke, to see this case for what it is: Basically, Keffe talked himself into prison.”
Kading, 63, is among a small group of people most responsible for setting in motion the events that ultimately put Davis in the defendant’s chair for the closely watched two-week trial. In 2008, he and another task force detective, Daryn Dupree, suspected Davis knew something about the killing of the Notorious B.I.G. and approached him in his garage with an offer. Davis could potentially avoid a life sentence in a separate drug trafficking case by cooperating and telling investigators what he knew.
Davis denied any role in Biggie’s killing. But then, according to Dupree’s testimony at trial, he startled the detectives by saying, “We did the other one.” Davis later sat for a surreptitiously recorded and highly pivotal proffer interview with his lawyer present. On the recording, Davis described riding in a car with three other men, including his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, when they spotted Shakur in a black BMW driven by Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight in Las Vegas on Sept. 7. 1996. Davis said he passed a loaded .40-caliber Glock to the back seat before Anderson opened fire amid an escalating feud between Davis’ South Side Compton Crips and the Mob Piru Bloods, a rival gang associated with Shakur and Knight.
The proffer meant Davis’ statements during the interview couldn’t be used as evidence in a criminal case. But after Kading left the LAPD in 2010, disillusioned by the effective dismantling of the task force, he published a book titled Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations. The self-published book revealed contents of Davis’ confession and led to a documentary. Prosecutors argued Monday that Kading’s disclosures angered Davis. They said Davis couldn’t resist trying to reclaim the narrative by speaking out in a BET docuseries and on the popular hip-hop shows The Art of Dialogue and VladTV.
Once Davis gave his account publicly, he waived his right to the protections of his proffer, the judge on his trial eventually ruled. He was arrested in 2023 and has been in custody ever since. His sentencing is set for Oct. 13.
Kading was on standby as a potential witness during the trial, so he avoided watching the testimony, he said. After learning he would not be called, he tuned in for closing arguments and heard a prosecutor push back against defense claims that Kading was a “disgraced” former officer who had “stolen” his investigative files when he left the department.
“There’s no evidence that Greg Kading did anything wrong,” Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo told the jury in some of his final comments before they started deliberating. “As a private citizen, he wrote a book like every other ex-cop who had a high-profile case.”
Kading says he greatly appreciated DiGiacomo’s statements. And when the jury verdict came, he was relieved and gratified. “It feels like vindication,” Kading said. “We’re never going to be able to overcome all the ridiculous conspiracy theories. So many people have lost the ability to think critically. But now it’s etched in stone for all of history that this is not an unsolved case. It’s a prosecuted case with a conviction, and so there’s justice. It sets history straight.”
He says while the defense’s “false allegations” against him felt “personal,” there was little he could do because they were made in court, where lawyers are generally protected from defamation claims for their statements. “Obviously I didn’t steal the file. If I had stolen the files, there would have been consequences,” Kading says. He made copies of investigative materials, he explains, and an Internal Affairs investigation later found the allegation that he stole anything “patently false.”
Kading also disputes the defense claim that he broke a promise to Davis by publishing his book. “There was never an agreement we were going to keep everything secret,” he says. “We never promised Keffe D any kind of anonymity.”
Kading says Davis is the one who ultimately undermined the protections of the agreement by speaking publicly about the killing himself. “His understanding of it all absolutely backfired on him,” Kading said.
When Kading learned that prosecutors had played the entire 2008 interview in court, he said the experience was “a little bit bittersweet.” He was not embarrassed, exactly, but he maintained he did not know the meeting was being recorded and would have conducted it more formally if he had. “Everybody’s talking at the same time. You can’t make half the stuff out,” he said. “But thank God it was recorded.”
Kading also rejected defense arguments that the prosecution’s account was implausible because Davis was not immediately killed in retaliation and because Knight later paid Anderson to testify on his behalf at a probation violation hearing. Kading says the “politics of gang life” were more complicated than that. Davis retreated to the safety of his Compton neighborhood, where he had protection, he explains. Knight, meanwhile, knew he and Death Row Records were “spiraling down” after Shakur’s death and had a more immediate interest in avoiding prison for a probation violation, Kading says.
Knight “calculated that he had to play nice with an enemy and even pay an enemy” so he could “first take care of the business of keeping [himself] out of prison,” Kading says.
Looking back, everything that happened led to the right result, eventually, in his mind. “I have no regrets whatsoever, none,” he says. “Everything worked out as good as I could possibly imagine. If I didn’t go public with the case, Keffe D never talks. And if he never talks, we never get a prosecution. It’s really weird how everything needed to happen the way it did for us to get where we are today. Keffe D could be in prison on drug charges, and that would be it. Tupac’s case would still be out there just floating around in the stratosphere.”
Kading says he now works in the field of private investigations and life is good. “Cosmically, what happens when you take a stand for truth, and you take a stand for justice, and when you are willing to maybe even take risks in order to pursue those things, it somehow pays dividends,” he says. “When you try to live as righteously as you can, somehow the universe blesses you in return.”
