\n<\/p>\n
In the adrenalized aftermath of a Mike Tyson prizefight in 1996, a black BMW carrying the rapper Tupac Shakur pulled up to a red light just off the Las Vegas Strip, thrilling the women in the car next to him.<\/p>\n
As Mr. Shakur hung out of his passenger-side window, his friends in the Lexus behind him assumed that he was inviting the women to his record label\u2019s new nightspot, Club 662 \u2014 its numeric name a barely disguised telephone code for \u201cMOB.\u201d<\/p>\n
The women pulled away and a white Cadillac took their place. A large, muscular arm emerged from its rear window and fired a barrage of shots from a .40-caliber Glock pistol into the BMW. Mr. Shakur was hit four times.<\/p>\n
The driver of the BMW, the Death Row Records impresario Marion Knight, better known as Suge, was grazed by the gunfire. But he managed to take off, making a U-turn over a traffic median and driving the wounded Mr. Shakur in the opposite direction before pulling over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Malcolm Greenidge, a rapper and close friend of Mr. Shakur\u2019s who had been following them in the Lexus, rushed out of the car to check on Mr. Shakur, he testified this summer to a Las Vegas grand jury. Mr. Shakur seemed less concerned with his wounds than with Greenidge\u2019s safety as armed police officers approached the chaotic scene, he recalled.<\/p>\n
\u201cGet on the ground, they\u2019re going to shoot you,\u201d Mr. Shakur told him, Mr. Greenidge testified. Mr. Shakur would die less than a week later<\/a>, at 25.<\/p>\n In the 27 years since, accounts of what happened on Sept. 7, 1996, have existed in an unwieldy tangle of news reports, true crime specials, street gossip, internet innuendo and dubious self-mythologizing. The case went cold.<\/p>\n But with last week\u2019s indictment of Duane Keith Davis<\/a>, a former Compton gang leader known as Keffe D, who has been saying publicly for years that he was in the white Cadillac when the fatal shots were fired, prosecutors have begun to map out the most detailed narrative yet of the chain of events they say led to Mr. Shakur\u2019s death, one that will be tested in court.<\/p>\n While the broad outlines of Mr. Shakur\u2019s killing and its possible motive have long been known, hundreds of pages of grand jury witness testimony reviewed by The New York Times \u2014 given under oath and with surprisingly vivid descriptions for a decades-old case \u2014 offer new details of how hyperlocal disputes between warring gang factions had spilled into an ultimately fatal rap beef that would alter the course of hip-hop history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The son of Black Panther parents and a onetime performing arts student turned hip-hop backup dancer, Mr. Shakur had broken out as a solo artist in the early 1990s with a unique blend of introspective street poetry and young man\u2019s fury. A proud antihero whose popularity only grew as he became mired in violence and rivalries, Mr. Shakur transformed in death into a hip-hop icon and pop culture martyr.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On Wednesday, Mr. Davis made his first appearance in Clark County District Court for a scheduled arraignment, which the judge postponed because Mr. Davis did not have a lawyer present, saying that his longtime California-based lawyer, Edi Faal, could not be there. In a brief phone interview, Mr. Faal said Mr. Davis, 60, intended to plead not guilty; he declined to discuss specifics about the case, saying he was in the process of getting Mr. Davis a Nevada lawyer.<\/p>\n \u201cLike in all cases, I think we should allow things to play out in the courtroom,\u201d Mr. Faal said.<\/p>\n Some of the new evidence challenges the conventional wisdom that had formed around the killing. While Mr. Davis had previously told law enforcement officials that the gun had been fired by his nephew, Orlando Anderson, who was killed in a gang-related shooting in 1998, two witnesses shared accounts with the grand jury casting doubt on the widely believed narrative.<\/p>\n Those close to the case have reacted to news of Mr. Davis\u2019s arrest with a mixture of shock and relief.<\/p>\n Allen Hughes, who directed two of Mr. Shakur\u2019s early music videos and worked with his estate on \u201cDear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur,\u201d a documentary series about the rapper and his mother that was released this year, said the family had wondered if there would ever be accountability for his death.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cAll these years, we all knew what it was,\u201d he said. \u201cJust because law enforcement didn\u2019t close the case, doesn\u2019t mean we didn\u2019t feel we knew who the true culprits were.\u201d<\/p>\n Now someone has been indicted in his death. And Greg Kading, a retired Los Angeles police detective who began to reinvestigate the killing in 2006, said, \u201cTupac Shakur\u2019s murder will never again go down as an unsolved mystery.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Shakur\u2019s music and public persona had taken on a darker edge following his 1993 arrest and subsequent conviction for sexual abuse<\/a>, as he aligned himself with the gangster rap label Death Row Records and its leader, Suge Knight, who orchestrated his $1.4 million bond pending appeal.<\/p>\n While still awaiting the verdict in the case, Mr. Shakur had been ambushed, robbed and shot<\/a> in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, an attack he later blamed on his former friend the Notorious B.I.G. and affiliates of the New York-based label Bad Boy Records, including Sean Combs, known then as Puff Daddy. (They denied involvement, with the Notorious B.I.G. claiming that his taunting track \u201cWho Shot Ya?\u201d had been written before the incident.)<\/p>\n After Mr. Shakur responded with the furious, personal diss \u201cHit \u2019Em Up\u201d in June 1996, what was once a simmering competition between the hip-hop vanguard on the East and West Coasts became a boiling feud, with each side relying on support from sworn enemies in the gang underworld for protection and street credibility.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Those rising tensions began to boil over as players from each side prepared to travel to Las Vegas to watch Mr. Tyson fight Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand Garden Arena.<\/p>\n Not long before the fight, a brawl at the Lakewood Mall in Southern California set off a sequence of retaliation.<\/p>\n Denvonta Lee, who said he was an affiliate of Compton\u2019s South Side Crips, told the Las Vegas grand jury this summer that Mr. Davis \u2014 who called himself \u201cthe five-star general\u201d of the local Crip set \u2014 had given a local football player $4,000 to shop for clothes before heading to college and told other gang members to accompany him to the mall.<\/p>\n There, the group of young Crips collided with a Death Row-affiliated group of Mob Piru Bloods, their nearby rivals, resulting in a struggle over a Death Row chain. \u201cThat\u2019s like taking somebody\u2019s crown,\u201d Mr. Lee testified. \u201cIt means something.\u201d Within 24 hours, he added, \u201ca war\u201d had broken out locally. \u201cThere was shootings everywhere,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n One of the participants in the mall fight, witnesses said, was Orlando Anderson, a nephew of Mr. Davis\u2019s known as Baby Lane. That September, Mr. Anderson traveled to Las Vegas with his uncle and other Crips for a weekend of boxing, gambling and revelry.<\/p>\n The heavyweight fight ended in less than two minutes with a first-round Tyson knockout. Some ticket holders hadn\u2019t even made it to their seats before it was over.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n As those gathered plotted their next moves for the evening, Mr. Anderson, brushing off the need for backup, found himself alone near the MGM hotel elevators and face to face with Mr. Shakur and his entourage of Bloods, including the same man whose Death Row chain had been targeted at the mall in California.<\/p>\n In a scuffle that was captured by security cameras at about 9 p.m. that night, the group began to punch and kick Mr. Anderson, who declined to cooperate with the police and hotel security after his assailants scattered.<\/p>\n Now, it was Mr. Anderson who was looking to exact revenge. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t coming back to Compton with nothing being done,\u201d Lee told the grand jury.<\/p>\n Mr. Davis, a successful drug dealer and \u201cshot caller\u201d for the Crips at the time of Mr. Shakur\u2019s death, wrote in a 2019 memoir, \u201cCompton Street Legend,\u201d that on the night of the shooting he obtained a Glock pistol from a drug associate from Harlem before setting out with Mr. Anderson to find Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight.<\/p>\n A childhood friend of Mr. Knight\u2019s \u2014 the two played Pop Warner football together \u2014 Mr. Davis had found himself enmeshed throughout the 1990s in the growing gangster rap nightlife scene, but his relationship with Death Row soured as the label became more closely associated with the Bloods. Mr. Davis instead aligned himself with their cross-country rivals at Bad Boy, supplying his Crip soldiers as West Coast security for the label\u2019s artists and executives, in exchange for access to concerts and parties.<\/p>\n Following a failed stakeout targeting Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight at Club 662, the white Cadillac that Mr. Davis and Mr. Anderson were riding in came upon Mr. Shakur\u2019s BMW by chance, spotting him as he leaned out from the passenger side.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIf Pac had not been hanging out of the window, we would have never seen them,\u201d Mr. Davis wrote. \u201cLike two rams locking horns, Suge and I looked each other dead in the eye.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n According to witness testimony and law enforcement accounts, Terrence Brown was driving the white Cadillac that night; Mr. Davis rode in the front passenger seat, with Mr. Anderson behind him and Deandrae Smith, known as Big Dre, also sitting in the back. (Mr. Davis is the only person in the vehicle who is still alive, the police said.)<\/p>\n In describing the shooting, Mr. Davis wrote in his memoir that he had tossed the Glock into the back seat before the encounter at the traffic light. While he has sometimes refused to say who fired the shots that night, he told law enforcement officials in interviews about 15 years ago that it had been Mr. Anderson.<\/p>\n But new testimony in the case suggests a different version of events.<\/p>\n Mr. Lee, the grand jury witness, was Mr. Smith\u2019s roommate at the time, and told the court in July that Mr. Smith had admitted at the time that he fired the shots that killed Mr. Shakur and injured Mr. Knight. \u201cOrlando didn\u2019t have a clear shot,\u201d he said, adding, \u201cDre said, \u2018Hey, give me the pistol,\u2019 got the pistol, boom, did his thing.\u201d<\/p>\n In the aftermath, however, speculation spread in Compton and beyond that Mr. Anderson had pulled the trigger as retribution for his beating at the MGM. Mr. Smith let Mr. Anderson have the \u201cglory,\u201d Mr. Lee testified. \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to take the credit for Orlando.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The indictment of Mr. Davis does not identify the shooter, stating that Mr. Davis provided the gun to Mr. Smith \u201cand\/or\u201d Mr. Anderson \u201cwith the intent that said co-conspirators commit said crime.\u201d Mr. Kading, the former Los Angeles detective, said in an interview that he believed that the \u201coverriding evidence is Keffe D\u2019s own admissions within his law enforcement interviews that he handed the gun to Orlando Anderson and Orlando Anderson pulled the trigger.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Anderson, his friend said, often stopped short of claiming the murder. \u201c\u2018You all crazy, man, don\u2019t believe everything you hear,\u2019\u201d Mr. Lee recalled him saying.<\/p>\n Immediately after the killing, as a related gang war broke out in Compton, the police there arranged what Robert Ladd, a former Compton Police Department detective, described to the grand jury as a \u201cmassive multi-gang search warrant,\u201d arresting known gang members to try to reduce the violence in the streets and searching the homes of Mr. Davis and the others from the white Cadillac.<\/p>\nBrawls and Retaliation<\/h2>\n
A Fatal Encounter<\/h2>\n
Sharing His Story<\/h2>\n