Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (22 page)

Orlando certainly seemed to have a surplus of motives to gun down Tupac in cold blood. We’d never know, of course, whether he pulled the trigger to restore his stained honor after the beating at the MGM Grand; to collect on the reward which Keefe D claimed that Puffy Combs had allegedly put on the heads of his rivals; or some combination of the two. But there was no question of his reasons for abruptly switching sides when Suge Knight subsequently faced a parole violation for his part in the MGM fracas.

As Keffe D alleged in a subsequent interview, Suge had met with Baby Lane several weeks after the shooting and offered him $16,000 in exchange for testimony exonerating Knight from involvement in the beating. When, after the meeting, an angry Keffe D asked his nephew why he was cooperating with the man who had humiliated him, Baby Lane had a simple response: “For the money.”

In point of fact, it seemed that Baby Lane never felt the need to explain anything he did, least of all the killing of Tupac Shakur. Like many others who had grown up on the streets of South Central Los Angeles, killing was its own reward, a reflexive reaction to slights real or imagined. The necessary proof of being a player came with an utter disregard for human life. That was the code he lived and, ultimately, died by, cut down on a Compton street corner in a hail of bullets over a trifling drug debt.

While there was still much left to do, we were confident we were closing in on the Tupac murder. But it wasn’t quite that simple. For one thing, it was not technically our call to make. The crime had occurred in Las Vegas. It was up to the LVMPD to declare the case closed, “Other” or otherwise. Normal procedure would be for us to turn over the results of our investigation to them — except that there was nothing normal about this case. What our work had uncovered went far beyond territorial protocol. If Keffe D was to be believed, Tupac’s death was the result of a murder-for-hire conspiracy initiated by Puffy Combs around a delicatessen table well within the LAPD’s jurisdiction. The alleged plot to kill the rapper had unfolded in our backyard and, as such, we could justifiably claim control over that part of the case.

But it was a slippery slope and we knew it. Strictly speaking, Vegas had a prior claim on Keffe D’s explosive allegations. But what would they do with it if we gave it to them? We were apprehensive that the Las Vegas investigators would insist on conducting their own interviews with various Persons of Interest, potentially exposing Keffe D as our source and impairing his ability to further assist us in the investigation.

We couldn’t let that happen. For one thing, there was a lot more we wanted to ask him. Detectives had lined up as soon as they heard about our talkative witness, eager to grill him on any number of unsolved cases. But more important,
we
weren’t finished with him. Finding out who had pulled the trigger on Tupac was just the first step. The next move was to gather evidence that would support Keefe D’s claim that Puffy Combs had initiated the hit. And for that we needed his continuing cooperation.

Of course, making the decision to deny police in another jurisdiction information that would have a direct bearing on an investigation they were still, at least in theory, conducting was way above our pay grade. Accordingly, during the mandatory monthly briefing with Chief William Bratton, we conferred with LAPD chief legal council Gerald Chaleff. One of the city’s more renowned defense attorneys, Chaleff had been named the department’s lead legal advisor after serving as president of the civilian Board of Police Commissioners, where he oversaw the Consent Decree Bureau, the Risk Management Group, and the Civil Rights Integrity Division. In short, Chaleff knew better than anyone the lines of authority and accountability within law enforcement jurisdictions. He could be depended upon to accurately assess the risks of cutting Las Vegas out of the loop. It was his decision, along with Chief Bratton, that we were not obliged to notify the LVMPD of our findings, thus freeing us to pursue the broader conspiracy case without jeopardizing our prized informant.

We were well aware of that informant’s shortcomings as a credible witness in any legal proceeding. No court in the country was going to accept the word of Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis, a convicted felon and a self-confessed liar. As to whether
we
believed what Keffe D was telling us, with certain reservations I’d have to say that we did. Granting his checkered past, and even discounting the incentive to honesty that U.S. Attorney Searight’s proffer agreement had provided, it seemed unlikely that Keffe D would willingly name himself as a co-conspirator in a major homicide case unless it was true. It would have been easy enough to distance himself from the carnage on Flamingo Road if he’d wanted to hedge his bets. Instead he implicated himself in a premeditated murder, claiming to have received the murder weapon from Zip Martin and driving to Club 662 with malice aforethought. He’d even boasted that he would have done the killing himself but for an accident of fate. According to his account, Tupac might never have been shot without the impetus provided by Keffe D. It was our considered opinion that we were getting the real story from a key participant in the crime.

But we were equally certain that his story would be taken apart by a team of defense attorneys accomplished in the art of dismantling witnesses. Sean Puffy Combs, and whatever high-powered legal team he might assemble, would never allow his allegations to stand unchallenged. If we were going to make our case for murder and conspiracy we’d have to come up with compelling new evidence that substantiated what Keffe D had told us. And that wasn’t going to be easy.

Of the principals allegedly involved in Tupac’s murder, Keffe D’s nephew, of course, was no longer available to assist in our inquiries. Nor was Dre Smith, who, against all odds, had died of natural causes brought on by morbid obesity. That left the wheelman, Terrence Brown. But for the moment, going after Brown made little sense. There was no indication that he had any knowledge of the bounty Puffy had, according to Keffe D, put on Tupac’s and Suge’s heads. And it was that element of the case that we were focused on. Brown could wait. That left one participant who could help us get to Puffy: Zip.

The plan, as Daryn and I formulated it in the weeks following the December meeting in Higgins’s office, was essentially a repeat of the tactics we had used to bring in Keffe D, arranging for him to reestablish contact with his onetime business partner for the ostensible purpose of setting up a new narcotics network between L.A. and Zip’s New York base of operations. If we could catch Zip in the act of buying drugs, we could put the squeeze on him to confirm Keffe D’s claim regarding Puffy’s million-dollar contract to eliminate Tupac and Suge.

The plan was not without its potential problems. For one thing, Keffe D and Zip had not seen each other since they had met in Hollywood a few days after the murder. For Keffe D to suddenly show up at Zip’s doorstep might raise some disconcerting questions, especially considering the unfinished business between the two. Keffe D still firmly believed that Zip had collected on half of the bounty Puffy had put up. Zip might understandably be nervous to see his old friend turning up to collect on his cut of the money. It was imperative to move cautiously. Keffe D would have to put on a performance that would convince Zip that he neither bore a grudge nor was looking to collect on the alleged bounty. More to the point, he had to make his interest in establishing a new drug operation sound credible. It would take time to gain Zip’s trust.

For his part, Keffe D seemed supremely confident in his ability to pull off the ruse. He even went so far as to suggest that he should instead go straight to Puffy Combs, eliciting the incriminating evidence straight from the horse’s mouth. We were quick to pull him back. The Puffy with whom Keffe D had associated in 1996 was hardly the same Puffy who now looked down from the lofty peak of his entertainment empire. In the intervening twelve years Combs had spiraled upward from one high-profile triumph to another. Bad Boy Entertainment Worldwide included Bad Boy Records, a veritable hit music factory featuring its premier artist: Puff Daddy aka P. Diddy aka “Ciroc Obama,”as he had reportedly taken to calling himself; the clothing line Sean John; a movie production company; and a pair of chic restaurants. He had a rèsumè that included plum film and Broadway acting roles and a glamorous, if short-lived, romance with Jennifer Lopez. It all contributed to the renaissance man’s estimated net worth of nearly $350 million. The likelihood of Puffy Combs getting together with Keffe D over lunch at Greenblatt’s seemed exceedingly slim. We did our best to focus his attention on the matter at hand: getting reacquainted with Zip.

It wasn’t until the early summer of 2009 that we were ready to make our move. On June 17, Daryn, Jim Black, and I escorted Keffe D on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. The following morning, Daryn, Jim, and I found ourselves driving down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard approaching Martin’s nightclub, Zip Code, to scope out the place before it opened. Even though we were with Daryn, both Jim and I were acutely aware of the hostile stares directed at two white guys snooping around in a black neighborhood. That night we returned to the location, followed this time by Keffe D in his own rented car. He and Daryn entered the club and asked for Zip. Informed that the owner was not on the premises, Keffe D left his cell number with instructions to have Martin give him a call.

Two days later, with still no word from Zip, we revisited the club, this time sending Keffe D in alone while we parked a few blocks away. This time we hit pay dirt. Zip arrived, in the company of a nephew known only as “Asziz,” just as Keffe D was walking to the front entrance. He was greeted like a long-lost brother, with Zip professing delight at seeing his old homeboy alive and well. As related in Keffe D’s subsequent debriefing, he told Zip that he was in town on a large drug deal with an associate in Queens and that while he was in the neighborhood he thought he’d drop by to see if Zip was interested in reviving their old business relationship.

In Keefe D’s version of the subsequent exchange, Zip hesitated, claiming that he was battling cancer and was simply too old to be involved in such a high-risk enterprise anymore. However, Keffe D said, he did have a suggestion: Martin’s nephew Asziz was just getting started in the trade and was on the lookout for a reliable PCP supplier. Maybe they could do some business together. Numbers were discussed, upward of $38,000 for a gallon of top-grade “embalming fluid,” quite a bump from the $10,500 Keffe D was accustomed to charging back in Compton. He said he exchanged phone numbers with the young entrepreneur and promised to stay in touch.

We were encouraged by Keffe D’s account of the meeting. While Zip would not be directly involved in the proposed transaction, he had supposedly done much to facilitate the arrangement, and we were hopeful that, once money began changing hands, he might want in on the action. We sent Keffe D back to Zip Code one more time to allay any possible suspicions with a purely social visit.

Shortly afterward we got an intriguing hit on a database search we had initiated back at task force headquarters. According to NY DEA agents, there was a possibility that “Asziz” was one Troy “Ish” Moore, who the agency suspected of being a lieutenant in Zip’s alleged Harlem drug operation. It seemed plausible to us that Zip had put Keffe D on to Asziz as a test of his old partner’s intentions. We were determined to supply Keffe D with whatever he needed to make good on those intentions.

CHAPTER
18

Sugar Bear

O
UR WORK WITH KEFFE D
had shed considerable new light on the question of who killed Tupac Shakur. But it had also served another purpose, one that brought us back at last to the original reason the task force had formed in the first place: to bring the killer of Christopher Wallace to justice.

“That wasn’t us,” Keffe D had decisively declared when we had asked him about the drive-by outside the Petersen Museum. It was, to our ears, a convincing denial. Claiming culpability in the Tupac murder lent weight to his assertion of innocence in Biggie’s death. We were inclined to take him at his word, and that inclination resulted in narrowing the scope of our investigation. “
Menace II Society
,” the part of the case that dealt strictly with possible Crips involvement in the Biggie killing, was moving toward resolution, if Keffe D’s statement was to be believed. Whatever else they might be held accountable for — including the death of Tupac — it seemed likely that the gang had had nothing to do with the Wallace murder.

That left “
Rap It Up
,” our name for the Mob Piru segment of the investigation. According to his uncle, Baby Lane, a Crip from the cradle, had killed Tupac and almost killed Suge. If that were true, then it was certainly plausible that the Piru would strike back by taking out Wallace, the biggest star in the stable of Puffy Combs. It was as simple as that.