Thirty years is a long time whichever side of the law you’re on.
Hair turns gray and memories fade, broad shoulders stoop and midsections sag. Feet go flat, and even those with a lifetime spent looking over their shoulders lose a step, or in some cases even the ability to walk. And they are the lucky ones.
Until his temper, greed, and mouth got the better of him, Duane “Keffe D” Davis was one of the fortunate few. For nearly three decades, the longtime drug trafficker and street gangster managed to hustle justice in one of the most high-profile unresolved murders in recent American history: the killing of rap music icon Tupac Shakur.
That’s over now. After a three-week trial in Las Vegas, it took just three hours on Monday to convict the 63-year-old Davis of first-degree murder with the use of a deadly weapon. After listening for hours to government tapes of Davis describing his role in the murder, jurors would be forgiven for thinking Keffe D was recorded almost as much as some aspiring rap artists.
Prosecutors declined to seek a gang enhancement, which would have further complicated his sentencing, despite his notorious street credentials. The admitted former South Side Compton Crips “shot-caller” was so proud of his gang affiliation and criminal career that he produced a memoir cataloging his felonies. It, too, would return to haunt him. He is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 13 by District Judge Carly Kierny.
Watching the trial unfold, I wondered often about the passage of time as the ghosts of my own Las Vegas past as a newspaper columnist stepped from the shadows and into a Clark County courtroom. There were respected former Metro homicide detectives Brent Becker and Dan Long, both gone gray, who had carried the burden of the unsolved murder, one riddled with conflicted characters on all sides. There was Reggie Wright Jr., the former Compton cop and son of the scandalized department’s gang unit lieutenant who moonlighted as security for gangster rap mogul Suge Knight, testifying from a motorized scooter.
With a pitbull scowl not softened by a tailored suit, Davis sat impassively at the defense table. With eyes well practiced in the art of the menacing stare, at times it was difficult to tell whether he was trying to rattle hostile witnesses from the old neighborhood.
News accounts during the trial often shorthanded Davis’ role by saying he orchestrated the homicide, but by Monday’s closing arguments it was clear that Keefe D was no meticulous maestro. He benefited from the confusion of a moving crime scene that crossed state lines, law enforcement jurisdictions, and prosecutorial priorities. He was accused not of pulling the trigger, but of setting off the September 7, 1996 murder following the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon heavyweight championship at the MGM Grand.
In three decades as a columnist, I was no stranger to covering the street gangs who regularly shot up poor neighborhoods over drug turf disputes or for no reason at all. The Shakur shooting was different by a scale of magnitude, one I didn’t fully comprehend at the time. I initially saw the homicide, as senseless as it was, as just another gang-related killing, albeit one with a celebrity twist. That began to change with the outpouring of sentiment following his death at University Medical Center six days after the shooting. (My much more nuanced account of the case was published in 2024 in Rolling Stone.)
From the start I followed developments in the investigation, which flourished and faltered in the headlines before fading like old newsprint. Complicated by real tensions between rap record label competitors Death Row and Bad Boy, and further twisted by the fatal March 9, 1997 drive-by shooting of Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Smalls, conspiracies shot up like weeds through cracked sidewalks. From cops to criminals, theories floated from season to season well into the new century.
Defense protests aside, Davis was considered a person of interest in the Shakur case almost from the start. After getting jammed up in a drug trafficking investigation, he began cooperating and gave interviews with now-retired FBI Special Agent Wade Lee as part of an Operation Safe Streets anti-drug gang task force. His cooperation resulted in a sentence reduction in a trafficking case, but he denied any role in Shakur’s murder.
His story would change in 2008. Once again in trouble and forced to deal with the law in a game of what some might have called liar’s poker, Davis agreed to be interviewed by LAPD and a federal task force investigating the Wallace murder and the record company rivalry. He admitted being at the crime scene — the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles — but claimed to know nothing about the murder. But he did know who killed Shakur.
“That was us,” he told investigators in an interview protected by a federal proffer letter, which offers limited immunity to enable informants to speak without fear of legal reprisal during the interview. The hook: Once he left the room, Davis had to keep his mouth shut. To borrow a line from the comedian Ron White, Davis had the right to remain silent, but he did not have the ability.
By 2009, Davis was back in trouble and was once again talking to the police. In a move that some of those closest to it call flat out “weird,” LAPD detective Daryn Dupree introduced Metro homicide detective Dan Long to Davis and his attorney, Wayne Higgins, with an offer to provide information about the Shakur murder. Long wasn’t initially informed of the existence of the proffer, and after hearing incriminating details – all recorded – coming from the hoodlum’s mouth, he intended to return to his office and write up an arrest affidavit.
But, as jurors learned, the confusion surrounding the existence of the proffer and the usefulness of an interview led to the decision not to prosecute at the time. Although the proffer glitch gave the defense what appeared to be a glimmer of hope, Long’s recording, too, was played for jurors. And there Davis was again, admitting to his role in the fatal shooting.
The supposed secrecy of the federal letter was blown for good in 2011 with the publication of Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by Dupree’s ex-partner, former LAPD detective Greg Kading. Although not called by the prosecution, Kading was on the minds of the defendant and his attorney Michael Sanft. Sanft characterized Kading as an unethical former cop who purloined a recording of the confidential proffer for profit.
By the time of his closing rebuttal, a red-faced Chief Deputy District Attorney Marc DiGiacomo bristled as he rattled off the damning recordings – all admissible as corroborated evidence.
“You have 2008, 2009, 2017 twice. You have 2019 with the book,” DiGiacomo told jurors. “… In 2023 this man was arrested, and he got on jail calls and he repeatedly said things that indicated he told the truth. When he says, ‘I didn’t break the deal. Greg Kading broke the deal.’ What was the deal? The deal was to keep it confidential. And why was that a problem in 2009 for us? Because we have a recording where our detective is asked to step outside the room. We have a lawyer coaching the defendant to not say things that can get him in trouble. We have a task force officer who is sitting in there going, ‘Yeah, but be consistent.’ And there is that whole very weird conversation. What we don’t know in 2009 is if even the 2009 statement is admissible in front of a jury. … But whatever Greg Kading did, whether you like it, don’t like it, cops write books. He wasn’t a signatory to the agreement.”
The Shakur case was finally reinvigorated after Davis’ arrest and indictment on September 29, 2023 outside his home in Henderson, a Las Vegas suburb, but even that news would be complicated by all that came before.
Even when being taken into custody that day, Davis couldn’t resist making an advertisement for himself. When a uniform officer asked Davis what he was arrested for, he replied, “Oh, man. The biggest case in Las Vegas history … September 7, 1996.”
Davis seemed tired, but still cocky that day. And why not? He had rope-a-doped law enforcement for years, cut deals without conscience that clipped the wings of underlings and enemies alike, at times to save not only himself but family members he hustled into his poisonous life. Ruthless? Keefe D could teach a graduate seminar.
Within weeks of his indictment, he was recorded making potentially incriminating statements in detention center phone calls, conversations which included the juicy remark that “I got blood on my money.” It was an apparent admission that he’d profited from the crime from his participation in the Death Row Chronicles docuseries, podcasts, and a book. But such loose talk would soon be a footnote for what came next.
During two weeks of trial testimony in District Judge Carly Kierny’s courtroom, nearly three dozen witnesses testified, most for the prosecution. But few statements they made compared to the hours of recordings admitted into evidence capturing Davis repeatedly admitting passing a .40 caliber Glock semiautomatic pistol from the front passenger seat of a white Cadillac directly behind him to his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson. With fellow Crips lifers Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown behind the wheel and Deandre “Big Dre” Smith filling up the backseat, the four men pulled alongside the black 750 BMW driven by Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight and Shakur. Anderson “started blasting,” Davis told interviewers in recordings repeated multiple times for jurors.
Defense protestations aside, the impact of Davis’s own voice on jurors seemed clear, and Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal managed to keep the multiple investigations and hip-hop rivalry testimony from falling down a rabbit hole. After the judge’s jury instructions ruled that his voluntary recordings were self-corroborating, Sanft was stuck, but deftly spun his client’s admissions and transgressions into a kind of Compton Crips cosplay riddled with blind alleys, conspiracies, and a thick layer of fiction that included the 2019 Davis memoir, Compton Street Legend. The attorney weaved threads of perceived inconsistencies in time-worn witness testimony and attempted to sow doubt about the security of Metro’s Shakur investigative files, and cronyism and corruption in the Compton Police Department.
None of it could drown out the sound of Keffe D’s bellicose baritone as he described his central role in the murder conspiracy, or his bursts of laughter as he described the night of the murder.
