Thirty years after the never-solved death of Tupac Shakur, the trial of Duane Davis, ex-figure of the South Side Compton Crips – a gang from a sensitive neighborhood of Los Angeles – has come to the heart of the matter, after a week spent selecting the jurors.
The former gang member, accused of having orchestrated the murder of the rap legend, acted out of “revenge” because he harbored a “visceral anger” against the rapper for having humiliated his nephew, and confessed everything himself, the prosecution argued on Monday August 17.
“Let’s be clear: Duane Davis did not pull the trigger, but what he did was plan the response to the beating of his nephew,” summed up prosecutor Binu Palal in court in Las Vegas.
Aged 63, the former drug trafficker pleads not guilty and risks life imprisonment.
Shrouded in mystery, the crime is one of the most famous “cold cases” in the United States. On the night of September 7, 1996, shots from a white Cadillac injured Tupac in Las Vegas, after he attended a Mike Tyson boxing match. The rapper died six days later at the age of 25.
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According to the prosecution, this was retribution because Tupac had humiliated Duane Davis’ nephew during a fight a few hours earlier.
Rivalries between West and East Coast rappers
Thirty years after the events, prosecutor Palal took the jurors back to the fierce rivalries between the rap scenes on the West and East coasts of the United States during the 90s, mixing music and gangs.
With his hits “California Love” and “All Eyez on Me”, Tupac Shakur embodied the slightly poetic bad boy of the “West Coast”. It was produced by Death Row Records, a label run by Marion “Suge” Knight, who used Mob Piru, a Los Angeles gang of which he was a member, to provide protection for artists.
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Opposite, the New York label Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, hired a rival gang, the South Side Compton Crips, during its travels in the West, to ensure the protection of its rappers like “The Notorious BIG” – killed six months after the death of Tupac Shakur.
These tensions turned into drama after the Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand casino. Suge and Tupac attacked Duane Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, because he had participated in a brawl during which a member of Mob Piru had his Death Row label torn off.
“Duane Davis knew that, in his world, this called for a response,” Binu Palal said. And “over the years, (…) Duane Davis described to us again and again the anger he felt and his own role in the revenge shooting targeting Tupac Shakur”, insisted the prosecutor.
Duane Davis returns to his confessions
As early as 2008, Duane Davis admitted to police that he was in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired, during an investigation into the death of “The Notorious B.I.G.” But his confidences came as part of an agreement providing for partial immunity, which prevented his statements from being used against him in the investigation into the murder of Tupac Shakur.
Over the years, the passengers of the famous Cadillac died. The ex-gang member then began to speak out in the media, then published a compromising memoir in 2019. He said he was in the passenger seat of the vehicle, and passed the gun to the passengers in the back seat, without revealing the identity of the shooter.
“Seeing them attack my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to them,” he wrote, in a passage cited Monday by the prosecutor.
But Duane Davis now assures that his book was fictionalized by his co-author, and that he was in Los Angeles on the evening of the murder.
On Monday, his lawyer Michael Sanft insisted on the weaknesses of the investigation – the Cadillac was never found, just like the murder weapon – and assured that the accusation is based on a “fiction”, rather than on verifiable facts.
If Duane Davis has not been prosecuted before, it is according to him because the police believed that he was “talking bullshit”. “Ask yourself this question,” he told the jurors. “What facts do they have after 30 years?”
With AFP
