Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (21 page)

“He did….shit, a million. I’d take fifty thousand.”

“So you tell him you’ll do it for million,” I repeated, “and he’s like ‘OK.’ He agrees. You shake on it or something like that?”

“No. It was more like a gentlemen’s…” He stopped, searching for the term. “Know what I’m saying?”

We knew what he was saying, all right. We were just having a hard time staying ahead of it all. According to Keffe D, Puffy Combs had put out a million-dollar contract on Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur. Which begged the next question.

“OK,” I said slowly. “So you guys make the deal.” Did they go out to Las Vegas to make good on it?

Keffe D shook his head vehemently. “We didn’t even have any pistols,” he insisted. He and his posse were just there for the fight. They had, he claimed, left for the Tyson-Seldon match that afternoon after breakfast at Gleenblatt’s, Zip in a Mercedes, Keffe D driving a rented Buick Century, and his brother Kevin Davis following in a rented van with a group of gang associates.

Up to this point Keffe D’s story tracked closely with the account he had given to the FBI in 1998. Baby Lane Anderson, he told us, had arrived the following day with Dre Smith and Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown, in a rented Cadillac. Keffe D and Zip had gotten tickets to the fight from a scalper and had gone out to dinner following the bout. It was there that Keffe D first got word that his nephew, who he hadn’t seen since his arrival, had been roughed up by Tupac, Suge, and the Mob Piru enforcers in the lobby of the MGM Grand.

But it was at this juncture that Keffe D suddenly dropped the old story and provided us a startlingly different version. Far from advising Baby Lane to bide his time until they returned to Compton, Keffe D claimed that he, his nephew and the others immediately began planning a counterattack. Zip arrived to offer assistance, he continued, and together they walked to the hotel parking lot. It was there, in a bizarre cameo, that the rapper Foxy Brown sat waiting in Zip’s Benz. Six months later, of course, she would be outside the Petersen on the night Biggie was killed.

According to Keffe D, after ejecting Foxy, Zip opened the armrest compartment and produced a .40-caliber Glock handgun. “He said it’s perfect timing,” Keefe D recounted, leaving the exact meaning of the words up to us. Was Zip talking about killing two birds with one stone, taking out Suge and Tupac as payback for the Baby Lane beating and in the process collecting Puffy’s million-dollar bounty? It was impossible to know for sure, since, in Keefe D’s account, Zip departed shortly afterwards, leaving the others to carry out the job by themselves.

Meanwhile, news of Tupac and Suge’s scheduled appearance at Club 662 had spread quickly. With that destination in mind, Keefe D said, the crew assembled at the MGM Grand entrance. He and Kevin Davis got into the rental van with the Crips Wendell Prince, Corey Edwards, and Tracy Sessions, along with another passenger, said to be from Detroit and unknown to Keffe D. They headed down Las Vegas Boulevard, his story continued, followed by the Cadillac carrying Baby Lane, Terrence Brown, and Deandre Smith. Forty-five minutes later, fighting the same heavy traffic that had slowed down the Death Row caravan, they pulled into the parking lot of the club.

The nightspot was crowded with fans in anticipation of Tupac’s arrival and the group of nine men did their best to blend in with the excited fans. But, according to Keffe D, the anticipation proved too much and a few of them, most especially Corey Edwards, began to lose their nerve. After twenty minutes they left, driving to a nearby liquor store for some liquid courage. It was then, said Keffe D, that he joined Orlando, Dre and Brown in the Cadillac. Leaving the others in the van at the parking lot, they drove back toward the club in the Caddy. Brown was behind the wheel, with Keffe D next to him in the front passenger seat, carrying Zip’s Glock. Dre occupied the rear seat behind the driver, with Orlando next to him.

“We came up to Las Vegas Boulevard,” Keefe D recounted, “and here he come in the BMW, the broads going ‘Tupac! Tupac!’ He gave himself away. So we made a U-turn and pulled up on the side and checked every car to see where he was.”

As the caravan turned down Flamingo Road and stopped for the light at Koval Lane, the Caddy moved up until it was parallel with the 750. “I thought we was going to pull up on my side,” Keffe D continued.

“So you were fixing to blast if you had to?” I asked.

“If we would have been on my side, I would’ve blasted.”

“So you handed the gun to the backseat?”

“Yeah, I gave it to Dre but he was like ‘No, no, no,’ and Lane was like ‘Give it here’ and popped the dude.”

Thirteen shots later, Brown accelerated into a hard right turn, followed by Ingrid Johnson and her girlfriends in the Sebring. “Stupid bitches,” Keffe D remarked, recalling that the women finally pulled to a stop. The Caddy drove into a parking lot across from the Carriage House, a hotel on East Harmon Avenue. Scrambling from the vehicle, Keffe D stated, Orlando hid the Glock in the right front wheel well of the Caddy. They then continued on foot back toward the Monte Carlo Hotel, where Keffe D was staying. As they headed to the casino entrance, they heard sirens wailing down the Strip and a moment later the ambulance carrying Tupac and the wounded Suge passed them by. “The ambulance was right next to us,” Keefe D remembered. “That shit was as funny as a motherfucker.”

Shortly after they arrived at the hotel, the remainder of the crew left behind in the van at the liquor store arrived. “They didn’t even know we did it,” Keffe D asserted. “I didn’t tell nobody shit.” Instead they went up to his room to “smoke weed and drink.”

The next morning, he continued, Brown went back to the Cadillac to pick up any stray shell casings and dispose of the murder weapon. Keffe D, his wife, Paula, along with Baby Lane and his girlfriend, returned to Los Angeles. The following day, claimed Keffe D, he received a phone call from Zip, requesting a meeting at a Hollywood hot wings stand at the corner of Melrose and La Brea. Puffy had called, Keffe D asserted that Zip had told him. He wanted to know, “Was that us?’”

“Did you talk to Puff, too?” Holcomb asked. Keefe D nodded, telling us that Combs had called again during his meeting with Zip.

“So,” Jeff Bennett asked, “when you talk to Puff on the phone does he ask you, ‘Was that us?’”

“Yeah,” Keffe D replied. “He was happy as hell.”

“Did you ask him about the money?” Daryn interjected. “About when you were going to get paid?”

“No. I told Zip to go get our cash.”

“So Zip was going to handle that part?” Daryn pressed.

“Yeah. I kept calling his ass.” Finally, after six weeks of trying, Keefe D told us, he arranged a meeting with Zip at the Roxbury, a music-business watering hole on Sunset Boulevard. It was there that Zip told him, “Puffy ain’t gave it to me yet.” Keffe D was soon to hear otherwise, when a rumor reached him from, among others, Combs associate Darrius “D Mack” Rodgers, that Puffy might have actually paid Zip for the murders. But by then there was little he could do to collect. He had been arrested in a major federal narcotics sweep.

We paused, looking at one another, trying to get our heads around what we had just heard. A long moment passed. Finally I turned back to Keffe D. “Since you’ve been out of prison,” I asked, “have you talked to Zip?”

“Not one time.”

“What about Puffy?”

“Not one time,” he repeated. “I tried to call him several times, though…if he would have just given us half the money, I would have stayed strong.”

There was no reason to ask why Keffe D would have settled for half the contract fee. Tupac was dead. Suge was still alive. Only half the job had been done.

PART

FIVE

CHAPTER
17

“Cleared Other”

I
N DETECTIVE WORK
what you look for so long and hard is often what’s been staring you in the face the whole time. As a rule, a criminal investigation is nothing like a whodunit: there’s rarely some last-minute revelation that it’s the last person you expected. Usually, it’s the suspect that was right up front with the means, motive and opportunity. The simple fact is that investigations aren’t primarily about solving a mystery. They’re about proving the facts.

We now had evidence that pointed to Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson as the killer of Tupac Shakur. With the benefit of hindsight it seemed obvious. If, prior to our interviews with Keffe D in late 2008, I’d been asked to put together a list of the most likely suspects, he’d have been at the top of the list. Knowing that didn’t make us great detectives. It was just common sense.

Anyone who had spent any time looking into the murder of Tupac Shakur had a pretty good idea who was responsible. That was especially true in Baby Lane’s Compton neighborhood. According to Keffe D’s statements, the women who had accompanied the Crips contingent out to Las Vegas, including his wife, Paula, were soon talking openly about what had gone down and who had pulled the trigger. It was just the kind of notoriety a gangster thrived on, even though, when directly confronted by investigative reporters, Baby Lane would indignantly deny everything. “If they have all this evidence against me,” he was quoted as saying nearly a year after the event, “then why haven’t they arrested me? It’s obvious that I’m innocent.”

What was obvious, of course, was something very different. But absent an inside account, it was impossible to prove. With Keffe D’s story we felt we had the proof we needed. He had put himself in the Cadillac, willing, as he had told us, to do the job himself if they had only pulled up on the other side of the BMW carrying Suge and Tupac.

To those of us in the task force, it made little difference that the suspect we had for so long sought had been dead for more than a decade. Our job was to close the case. And there was more than one way to do that. In the LAPD’s
Detective Operations Manual
the option is spelled out in the definition of the term “Cleared Other.” “When a crime report is…’Cleared Other,’” the manual reads, “it means that the detective has solved the crime and has taken all possible, appropriate action against at least one suspect. It also means that no further action or investigation is expected to take place regarding the suspect…’Cleared Other’ shall be indicated when a case has progressed to a point where further action cannot reasonably be taken.” In a subsection delineating how a case is declared “Cleared Other,” the first item on a list of circumstances of being “outside of police control” is “death of the perpetrator.”

It would have been nice to make a headlining arrest of Tupac Shakur’s murderer, bring Baby Lane in for a perp walk and claim our fifteen minutes of fame. But that wasn’t going to happen. “Cleared Other” was as close as we were going to get and, as far as we were concerned, that was close enough, especially when it came to an investigation that had languished in a cold-case file for a dozen years. For the friends and family of Tupac Shakur, we had offered, at long last, a chance for closure.