Duane Davis speaks for the first time in Tupac Shakur murder trial
Las Vegas (CNN) — Under a canopy shielding them from the desert sun that pushes temperatures to nearly 110 degrees, Las Vegas tourists rode zip lines down Fremont Street. In a courtroom three blocks away, attorney Michael Sanft was performing his own high-wire act.
The defense attorney for Duane Davis, representing the only person ever charged in Tupac Shakur’s murder, told jurors his client’s frequent comments about his involvement in the fatal shooting on September 7, 1996 – starting with a secret interview with the LAPD back in 1998, and continuing with public statements, podcasts and a book – were a nearly two-decades-long work of fiction.
“BULLSH*T,” Sanft summed it up in all-capital letters on a slide in his opening statement Monday, August 17.
Before court went into session that day, a long line of people was winding through the lobby of the downtown Regional Justice Center in downtown Las Vegas, waiting to pay traffic tickets. One of the only signs of the trial that has drawn international attention was on a set of 14 video screens that lay out all of the cases to be heard in the building each day.
Virtually hidden among the hundreds of cases listed alphabetically in tiny print was one name listed in the middle of the second screen: “DAVIS, DUANE KEITH.”
That’s how the Nevada justice system knows him. The rest of the world calls him “Keffe D.”
A jury just completed the first week of what is expected to be a month-long trial over Davis’ alleged involvement in the murder of the famed Shakur, determining whether Davis is a serial liar or a stone-cold killer.
Questions over which version of Davis to believe – and whether justice is even possible for a murder that happened nearly 30 years ago, with witnesses aging, memories fading and so many key figures dead – were at the heart of the first week of this trial, which has resurrected a uniquely flamboyant and violent time in music history.
“In this world, silence means survival,” prosecutor Binu Palal told the jury. “The one person who has a hard time being silent is Duane Davis.”
Taking the jury back in time
Each day of the trial has required explanations for how the world was different in 1996, a reminder for the older jurors and a remedial education for the younger ones. Cellphones – the kind used to actually talk to people rather than text and post to social media – weren’t mandatory personal equipment yet, though various personalities involved at the time had them.
A key piece of evidence – a paper hotel bill showing a series of 75-cent charges for local calls – now looks like a yellowing artifact from the distant past. Surveillance video showing Shakur’s entourage leaving the MGM Grand after assaulting Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson – the event prosecutors say prompted Davis to plan murderous revenge – has the telltale wavy lines of its source, an old analog videotape.
“We had to maintain a VHS player in homicide to be able to view those things,” former Vegas police officer Dean O’Kelley noted on the witness stand.
The passage of time is also seen in the witnesses themselves. The investigators who haven’t already died are almost all retired, some of them awkwardly testifying via Zoom with technical difficulties from homes far away. The young partier who witnessed the shooting from a passing car appears on the stand as a modestly dressed, middle-aged woman. Reggie Wright, Jr., once the feared head of security for Death Row Records, is too weakened by Long Covid to walk to the witness stand, testifying instead from his electric scooter.
Sanft, who often tells witnesses not to worry when they can’t precisely remember events of 30 years ago, said the passage of time is his client’s best friend, especially when police did not write formal reports on many of the events in the prosecutors’ timeline, including the assault on Anderson.
“The length of time is going to be a huge problem for anybody to try to recall things,” he told reporters. “That’s why police reports are important.”
Prosecutors argued that kind of documentation is unnecessary when Davis explained it himself, through interviews both private and public that continued all the way up to the eve of his trial.
“Even in private calls, Duane Davis has repeatedly told us over and over again about the anger he felt and his own role in the revenge drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur,” said Palal.
The code of the streets is broken
Davis first publicly took the lid off his own gang history in a 2018 documentary, saying he needed to get the story off his chest.
“I’ve got nothing else to lose. All I care about now is the truth,” Davis said in a clip promoting the BET series “Death Row Chronicles.” Davis has said he did the program for the money, and the producer of that program testified Davis was paid to appear.
When Davis decided to cash in further on his history a year later with his book, “Compton Street Legend,” it was more than just a legally unwise tell-all. It was the key that unlocked hours of previously-protected testimony police had in their back pocket all along.
Prosecutors revealed Davis’ admittedly big mouth had been opening to investigators since 1998 – only two years after Shakur was gunned down – in a series of secret interviews trying to minimize his own legal damage by giving information to the cops.
By 2008, police in Los Angeles were trying to figure out who killed Christopher Wallace – better known as “Biggie Smalls” and “The Notorious B.I.G.” – the former friend of Shakur who had become his biggest rival, slain in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting only six months after Shakur’s murder. In a proffer agreement, Davis agreed to spill his guts again in exchange for a lighter sentence on drug charges.
But Davis said he had no real information on Wallace’s killing. Instead, he said he could break new ground on Shakur’s death.
“Nothing you say today will be used against you,” LAPD detective Greg Kading said at the outset of the interview recording played during court proceedings.
With that, Davis told investigators he had arranged to get the gun used to murder Shakur, which has never been found, originally intending to do the deed himself, but unable to shoot from across the vehicle. The gun, he said, eventually went to his nephew, Baby Lane.
“Lane’s like, ‘Give it here.’ He popped it to him,” Davis said in the recording.
Davis even told police there was more to the killing than his own personal revenge, saying Bad Boy Records impresario Sean “Puffy” Combs, now known as “Diddy,” agreed to pay him a million dollars to kill Shakur and Knight but stiffed him after Shakur’s death.
Diddy, who has repeatedly denied any connection to Shakur’s killing, is now in prison on unrelated charges.
“Davis has denied his own claims, maintaining that he made the statements to gain fame and notoriety and that they were not true,” representatives for Combs said in a statement to CNN.
Although Sanft vigorously objected to permitting the jury to listen to the recording during the lead-up to the trial, citing law enforcement’s confidential terms, Judge Carli Kierny said prosecutors had the right to play them in court to show they largely matched what Davis later said in his book and other public interviews – that Davis was taking credit for the shooting even before there was money riding on it.
Davis sat stoically and silently through the trial’s first week in front of the jury, a contrast to the recordings they were watching of him going on for literally hours about his criminal history.
But by Friday, and with jurors barely out of the room for a recess, Keffe D couldn’t hold his tongue any longer, accusing the prosecutor’s office and their witnesses of putting his address on the street.
“They broke in my house, vandalized my house, vandalized my wife’s car, you know what I’m saying?” he told Kierny. “Because they keep giving out my address. Now they gave out my sister’s address. This stuff is wrong.”
As Kierny admonished both sides to follow the court’s rules, Davis took on prosecutor Michael DiGiacomo directly.
“The guy attacked me in here, sent me to prison. It’s just wrong,” said Davis.
“For the record, I think he’s indicating he’s upset I’m prosecuting him for murder,” DiGiacomo responded.
A gangbangers’ reunion
For the survivors of the game, the Davis trial serves as an unwelcome reunion of friends and rivals. Some witnesses acknowledge from the stand they are only testifying because the court ordered them to.
James McDonald, a former member of the Mob Piru Bloods, spoke about the security he helped organize for Club 662 on the night of Shakur’s death. It was the intended destination for the rapper, a nightspot run by Death Row Records owner Marion “Suge” Knight – Shakur’s boss, mentor and, on that night, his driver.
Although McDonald, now 63, has since renounced the gang culture that claimed the life of his brother Alton “Buntry” McDonald and countless friends, he refused to share the names of other people at the club that night, saying he is still bound by a code.
“I don’t want to send him to prison,” McDonald said in frustration while looking at Davis, “even though we don’t like each other.”
Even a former LAPD detective, Daryn Dupree, who was present at the secret meeting in Los Angeles where Davis first said he was directly connected to Shakur’s killing, expressed some ambivalence about speaking out.
“I’m from the ‘hood,” Dupree said on the witness stand. “I stick to the code, OK? I abide by the streets. This is the only time you’re going to see me talking about what somebody did, sitting in this chair.”
But the trial has also exposed that code being secretly broken over and over again, with multiple witnesses from Davis’ neighborhood in Compton, California, acknowledging they, too, had become confidential informants when cops put the pressure on. It was a constant shell game of public loyalty and private betrayal.
“All the sons of b*tches did me dirty,” Davis groaned to police in the 2008 recording with no apparent sense of irony.
As officers in his proffer interview gave him an inventory of various Crips colleagues who were snitching, on the run from police or already in prison, Davis summed up the reality of gangsta life.
“The game ain’t right,” he said. “I’d advise everybody to quit, dude.”
McDonald, who like Davis is now a grandfather, lives with his own regrets.
“The destruction of myself, my community, my neighborhood, I gotta pay it back,” he told reporters this week after his reluctant testimony.
Curious spectators flock to the courthouse
The compact courtroom where the bloody rap rivalry between East Coast and West Coast is revisited daily only has about 40 seats in the gallery – narrow fold-down chairs, with about half of them taken up by Shakur family members, their friends, and members of the media. The remainder go to the general public, a combination of the curious and the devoted.
The journey to the courtroom for Dean Malone took a 16-hour bus ride from Denver – and three decades of fascination with the case. Once a hopeful rapper himself who went by “Lil’ Therapy,” Malone said Shakur was his inspiration, and he decided he needed to see the trial in person for himself.
“I’ve been grieving for 30 years,” said Malone, wearing his black Tupac shirt turned inside-out to comply with court rules on how court visitors have to dress.
Some friends said Malone could crash with them for the month the trial is expected to take.
It’s a different story for the couple a few seats away from Malone. Harry and Donna Brown are retirees from Muskegon, Michigan, visiting Vegas for Donna’s birthday. With a long-standing interest in court cases and time on their hands, they decided to spend a day at the high-profile trial they’d heard about after the Rod Stewart concert they had planned to attend was canceled.
“So, we thought, what are we going to do now?” said Donna Brown. “This should be interesting.”
While some people sat in the courtroom for only one day to punch their ticket of pop culture curiosities, Tupac Shakur’s stepbrother Mopreme Shakur and sister Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur showed up every day, surrounded by family, friends and a representative of the Clark County District Attorney’s office, who carefully weaved them through a back door of the courtroom away from reporters at each break.
The family sat grim-faced and rarely physically reacted to the extensive testimony about gang violence and Tupac Shakur’s doomed trip to Las Vegas. But by the end of the first day, Set Shakur acknowledged the strain.
“It was just a whole lot,” she told CNN. “A lot of information to take in.”
She and Mopreme were absent from the trial only once, when the prosecutor’s office advised they were about to show Tupac Shakur’s autopsy photos Tuesday. Walking out during a recess, they spared themselves the sight of their brother’s lifeless body emerging from a sealed bag. Tubes from hospital equipment were still attached to his face, gunshot wounds on his right side were still gaping, and tattoos which included a gun and a bullet casing were still embedded in his skin, a permanent memorial to the tools of his demise.
Jurors get their own say
The jury box has its own eclectic mix. The juror sitting closest to the Shakur family wears a dark suit and tie to court every day. Behind him sits one of the youngest jurors, attending the trial with lip studs and a rotating assortment of rock band T-shirts.
For most, though, the dress is business casual, matching the growing casualness of their behavior in the box over the course of long sessions. By Day 3, jurors who barely acknowledged each other in the courtroom were having quiet, lighthearted conversations during breaks in testimony.
No matter their age, all of the jurors were attentive the first week, frequently scribbling in their court-provided notebooks. Occasionally, they would write down a question and tear it through the spirals to be passed to Judge Kierny, part of Nevada’s unique system allowing juries to do their own examination of witnesses.
The scene of the crime, 30 years later
There is no monument to Shakur at the corner of Flamingo Road and Koval Lane where he was shot. At least, not an official one.
Fading tributes painted on the sidewalk and a utility pole covered in handwritten messages pay tribute to the rapper, feet from the spot prosecutors say a white Cadillac with Davis in the front passenger’s seat pulled up and gunfire erupted into the neighboring BMW where Shakur sat. Four shots hit Shakur while another grazed Knight’s head.
A lot has changed at the intersection since then. Yellow median posts block the kind of dramatic U-turn Knight took after the shooting, driving furiously back toward The Strip as blood trickled down his face.
A 17-story hotel has risen behind the gas station previously used as the intersection’s landmark. A half-mile to the north, the projected image of Orbi, the yellow smiley face mascot of the Sphere, the latest of Sin City’s unique entertainment monuments, keeps watch.
A kingpin’s reign is over
On the night of Shakur’s death, Davis was able to get all of his friends into the Tyson fight, paying a scalper whatever it took as they all drove hundreds of miles for a Vegas party with expensive food and wine. Now, most of those friends are dead. Unable to raise the $750,000 for his bail, his excursions are limited to trial dates. As the massive steel sallyport doors of the Clark County Detention Center fold open, Davis is taken one block from his cell to the courthouse.
The drug money that funded Davis’ lifestyle has long since dried up, and his defense depends on a lawyer willing to take his case for free.
That dramatic rise and fall, and the murder that shook the industry, are now being chronicled by another group that didn’t exist in 1996: podcasters. Even as he acknowledges his client should not have spoken so much, Davis’ defense attorney has also discussed the case at length recently on podcasts.
“The idea of money with the Davis family has never been an issue for me, nor has this money come from any other source. Because there isn’t any,” Sanft told podcaster Lena Nozizwe last month.
Outside the courtroom of this trial, traditional TV cameras sit side-by-side with cellphone cameras manned by new media journalists and commentators feeding an audience hungry, not just for true crime, but also for a look back in time.
One of the people in the courtroom gallery every day is Canadian journalist Kathy Kenzora, who hosts the “History of the 90s” podcast. Her biweekly nostalgia program has turned into a daily online recap of the Keffe D trial. She says it’s what her audience wants.
“What other chance are we going to have to see a trial on such a big case from that decade?” she asks rhetorically. Only a couple of seconds of reflection bring the answer.
“Unless they catch Biggie’s killer.”
The-CNN-Wire
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