On August 31, Duane “Keffe D” Davis was convicted of first-degree murder for his role in the death of famed rapper Tupac Shakur 30 years earlier.
Prosecutors argued that Davis and his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, “went hunting” for Shakur after Anderson was in a fight with him and his entourage at the MGM Grand following a Mike Tyson boxing match, Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal said.
According to Palal, Davis led the charge through his role as a “shot caller” for the Southside Compton Crips and, ultimately, was driven by self-interest in his statements.
The defense countered by saying that the evidence tying Davis to Tupac’s killing was inconclusive and that the prosecution had not presented documentation to show that Davis was even in Las Vegas at that time.
Evidently the jury did not believe this. But regardless of whether Davis was involved in the murder in some capacity, he is a small fish compared to some of the big players who were involved in Tupac’s murder, which appears to have been orchestrated at higher levels.
Like other Black artists, Tupac was a target of offshoots of the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation.
He came from a radical family linked to the Black Power Movement and was considered a threat to revitalize the spirit of that movement, especially because his rap songs adopted subversive anti-establishment messaging.
The FBI, at the behest of ruling U.S. elites, deliberately provoked internecine conflict among Black rappers and groups that, if united, could have potentially mobilized Black youth in a political direction and away from the gang violence that has helped to devastate the Black community along with neo-liberal economic policies that have affected them disproportionately, racialized policing and the War on Drugs, which has spawned a new Jim Crow.
Tupac himself had expressed admiration for the Black Panther Party—the central target of COINTELPRO in the 1960s and early 1970s, and believed that he was a target of COINTELPRO.
Short for Counter-Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO was an FBI program instituted in the 1950s to covertly disrupt radical political organizations in the United States. The program is also known to have targeted artists and musicians, as well as non-violent political dissidents.
In former Black Panther Lee Lew Lee’s 1996 film All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond, FBI agent whistleblower Wes Swearingen, CIA whistleblower Phil Agee, and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark detailed how U.S. intelligence operations such as the FBI’s CounterIntelligence Program, murderously targeted The Black Panther Party (excerpted in Drugs as Weapons Against Us 1:00:30- 1:57).
Agent Swearingen stated fellow agents told him that their FBI CounterIntelligence (COINTELPRO) was “officially” closed in 1971 but these activities continued at least until 1995, under different names. These activities in turn are thought to be connected to Shakur’s 1996 death.[1]
According to U.S. intelligence researcher John Judge, “there’s quite a bit of evidence that has come out over the years about the surveillance of [Shakur]. Apparently there were people that were surveilling him at the time of his murder that were never questioned by police.”
U.S. Intelligence and the Black Panther Shakur Family
Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was a section leader of the Harlem Black Panthers, and his stepfather, Dr. Mutulu Shakur (Jeral Wayne Williams), was a founding member of the Republic of New Afrika.
U.S. intelligence unsuccessfully tried to frame Afeni as part of the New York Panther 21, a group of Panthers who were accused of targeting New York police officers and planning terrorist acts. Dr. Shakur was imprisoned for decades, on charges of conspiring to rob a bank (1981 Brinks robbery) and for breaking Assata Shakur from prison.
Tupac’s “Auntie Assata” was imprisoned for purportedly shooting a police officer, while his godfather, Geronimo (Ji-Jaga) Pratt, led the Los Angeles Black Panthers and was falsely imprisoned for decades.
Police shot at Assata while she had her hands raised and shot at Geronimo’s bed as, fortunately, he was sleeping on the floor due to a bad back caused by a Vietnam War injury.
After activists stole documents from an FBI office in 1971, they found that the FBI orchestrated most of these attacks on Black Panthers like Assata and many others under COINTELPRO.
Police Attempted to Murder Tupac Before: Oakland in 1991 and Atlanta in 1993
The New Afrikan Panthers, active in nearly a dozen cities, elected Tupac Shakur as their National Chairman in 1989. Tupac’s music celebrated blackness and gave voice to the frustrations and disillusionment so many black youth faced with the prevailing political-economic system while provoking empathy for the system’s victims.
Tupac continued his activism with his imprisoned stepfather Mutulu Shakur and his Black Panther extended family by helping to spread a truce between the Bloods and Crips gangs from a few areas around Los Angeles to across the country.
There were at least four attempts on Tupac Shakur’s life with police foul play involved before he was murdered at the age of 25 in September 1996.
Several days after MTV released the political song “Trapped” from his solo debut CD in 1991, Oakland police stopped him purportedly for jay-walking, pounded his head against the curb and choked him into unconsciousness.
In Atlanta, Georgia, in 1993, two allegedly off-duty police officers shot at Tupac with a gun they had stolen from an evidence locker.
LA Police Detective: Police Killed Rapper Biggie to Cover up Their Murder of Tupac
An assailant fatally shot Tupac Shakur from another car in Las Vegas after a Mike Tyson heavyweight championship boxing match on September 7, 1996.
Six months later, a gunman fatally shot Tupac’s former friend and fellow top rapper Christopher “Biggie/Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace in Los Angeles.
After Biggie’s murder, Los Angeles Police Detective Russell Poole said that he found out that his fellow police officers murdered Biggie to distract from their murder of Tupac, trying to make it look like a rap rivalry.[2]
Detective Poole found dozens of his fellow police officers at all levels of Tupac’s last record company, Death Row Records.
When Detective Poole asked his superiors what all those LA officers were doing there, they told him you can call them “trouble shooters or covert agents.”[3]
