I’ve been doing lots of media about the Tupac murder trial. Last week I was at a resort in northern Minnesota with my family when the BBC called. In a vacation-addled state of mind, I thought I heard them say it was for radio. Instead, it was for the BBC World Service, a live TV program. When I logged onto the Zoom I was horrified to see everyone dressed to the nines.
I had literally just come from the pickleball court, wearing a t-shirt. Even worse, the resort, an outdated but lovable relic of the 1970s located in a tiny town called Brainerd, had barely any wifi. The only place I could find good reception was in the wood-paneled, ‘70s-era clubhouse.
Suffice it to say, I didn’t exactly wow my British audience. My friends wondered what they must have thought of this sweaty, middle-aged white guy reporting on gangsta rap live from Northern Minnesota. “It’s got to be the first time ‘Brainerd’ and ‘Tupac’ have been used in the same sentence,” one joked.
But it’s all just as well. This trial is a joke.
It is not what Tupac deserves, as the most beloved artist in hip-hop history. The fact that no one has been convicted of his killing, thirty years later, is awful. His greatest champion, his mother Afeni Shakur, has now been dead for ten years herself.
The man being prosecuted — Duane “Keffe D” Davis — is a bumbling villain. He’s coarse, he’s self-serving, he’s opportunistic. And he’s an idiot.
Davis’ initial confession, to the LAPD in 2008, was part of a plea deal, so it couldn’t have been held against him. That is, until he effectively tore up the deal with his 2019 tell-all confessional, Compton Street Legend: Notorious Keffe D’s Street-Level Accounts of Tupac and Biggie Murders, Death Row Origins, Suge Knight, Puffy Combs, and Crooked Cops.
Terrible book title, worse content. It’s basically like if O.J.’s If I Did It was instead called I Did Do It. Davis, in plain English, admits to providing the murder weapon used to kill Tupac.
Now, Davis’ defense team argues that the book is nonsense, fictionalized, intended only to sell copies. Besides, since Compton Street Legend had a co-author, it’s not always clear whose confession belonged to whom.
Preposterous. Yesterday, the jury heard Davis’ 2008 interview with detective Greg Kading, the plea deal interview. In it, Davis described the night of Tupac’s shooting in Las Vegas almost exactly how he did in his book:
When Davis and his nephew Orlando Anderson, riding together, saw Tupac, Davis gave a gun to Anderson and Anderson opened fire. “If he would have been on my side, I would have blasted,” the jury heard Davis say yesterday, in his impossibly-low, comic book supervillain voice.
Remember, Davis is not being accused of killing Tupac, but simply of “orchestrating” the murder.
But here’s the thing: nothing about this murder was “orchestrated,” and we still don’t really know who did it.
As has been well documented, Tupac had come to Las Vegas with his fiancé Kidada Jones, whom he had a bad habit of cheating on. Leaving Jones behind at the hotel, Tupac attended the Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand with Suge Knight and his crew. After the fight, Tupac and the entourage saw a Compton rival — Orlando Anderson — and stomped him out, right there on the casino floor, right on camera.
Anderson and his uncle Davis were also in town for the Tyson fight. They hadn’t even known Tupac was there. They certainly hadn’t come to murder him.
What is certain is that Anderson, along with the guys he’d come from Compton with — his uncle Davis, and a pair of fellow Crips named Terrence Brown and Deandrae Smith — were absolutely incensed. Understandably! They bought liquor, they armed themselves, they got into their Cadillac, and began prowling town for Tupac.
Tupac might have lived that night, had he made himself scarce. He could have gone back to the hotel room he was sharing with one of the world’s most objectively beautiful women, Kidada Jones, the daughter of Quincy Jones and celebrated fashion model Peggy Lipton.
Instead, he got into Suge Knight’s BMW and they began blasting Tupac’s new album, drawing attention to themselves as they drove across town to Suge’s club. A group of female fans saw them and began screaming out Tupac’s name, and this tipped off the prowling Compton guys in the Cadillac.
And then, by all accounts, someone in the Cadillac killed Tupac.
But who? To this day, almost everyone assumes it was Anderson, but there’s no real evidence for that. No ballistics. No DNA. He was questioned by Vegas police but never charged, and then murdered two years later in an unrelated incident.
It was only after his death that his uncle Davis, quite conveniently, blamed him for the murder.
I don’t know who killed Tupac, but I do know…