The trial of a former criminal gang leader accused of orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur begins today in Las Vegas, 30 years after the death of the famous American rapper. The trial is unlikely to reveal who fired the shots that killed the musician on the night of September 7, 1996, as he was visiting the city to attend a Mike Tyson boxing match.
However, prosecutors hope to demonstrate that Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the former leader of the South Side Compton Crips gang, ordered the killing and supplied the murder weapon. At 63, he faces a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The murder remains one of the most famous unsolved cases in the United States, and the subject of endless debate among music fans. Killed at 25, “2Pac” was a central figure in the notorious rivalry between the West Coast and East Coast rap scenes.
With hits like “California Love” and “All Eyez on Me,” performed over melodies blending smooth tunes with heavy beats, this son of a member of the Black Panthers, a well-known African American militant group, embodied the image of a rebellious “West Coast” kid.
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The trial promises to revisit the ego wars between his label, Death Row Records, founded by Marion “Suge” Knight, and Bad Boy Records, created on the East Coast by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, where Christopher “The Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace worked, another famous rapper killed six months after Tupac Shakur’s death.
According to prosecutors, Death Row Records was protected by the Mob Piru, a Los Angeles gang of which Suge was a member, while Bad Boy Records had hired the rival organization, the South Side Compton Crips, led by Duane Davis, for its protection.
After the Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand casino, Suge and Tupac assaulted Duane Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, after he had ripped a medallion off the neck of one of Death Row’s employees. The gang leader is then said to have organized a retaliation, according to prosecutors.
Due to a lack of evidence, the investigation stalled for decades before being reopened following the 2019 publication of Duane Davis’s memoir.
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In the book, he describes being in the front seat of the white Cadillac from which the fatal shots were fired at Tupac. He also explains having passed a pistol to the back seat, without ever saying who fired it. All the other passengers in the vehicle have since died.
Compromising statements, consistent with earlier interviews given to the press, ultimately worked against him and led to his arrest in September 2023. Now, however, the former gang leader denies those confessions and has pleaded not guilty.
“I’m innocent. I never killed anyone,” Davis told ABC News in March 2025, in an interview from prison. “They don’t have any evidence against me. They can’t even prove I was in Las Vegas.” He now claims he was in Los Angeles on the night of the crime and that he never read his own memoir, which he says was romanticized by his co-author for commercial reasons.
“I just gave him details about my life,” he said. “And he went and did his own little research and wrote the book himself.”
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Ahead of the trial, his lawyers fought to prevent the book, as well as a 2008 police interview in which he participated as a witness, from being used as evidence against him. Their efforts failed. The hearing is expected to last four weeks, with the first week devoted entirely to jury selection. Whatever the verdict, it is unlikely to satisfy Tupac Shakur’s family.
In May, his half-brother filed a civil lawsuit arguing that “there continue to be individuals involved in Tupac’s murder who, 30 years later, have not been held accountable for their crimes.” The complaint notably references the recent documentary miniseries “Sean Combs: The Reckoning,” in which Duane Davis states, during a police interrogation, that P. Diddy allegedly offered him one million dollars (€865,360) to have Tupac killed.
