Duane Davis may be the man on trial in Las Vegas, charged with helping to arrange the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur. But during testimony, few days have passed without a mention of Sean Combs.
“P. Diddy, Sean Combs, Puffy — I don’t know what name he’s going by today,” one witness said on the trial’s second day of testimony, by way of identifying him for jurors.
Mr. Combs, who is in prison on prostitution-related convictions, was the record producer at the center of a 1990s bicoastal rap beef that has, for years, figured into theories about one of hip-hop’s most notorious killings.
He has long denied any involvement, but before the trial, in several settings, Mr. Davis accused Mr. Combs of ordering a hit on Mr. Shakur and his label boss, Marion Knight, known as Suge.
“He said he’d give us anything for those dudes’ head,” Mr. Davis told the police in 2008, when he was under the threat of drug charges. That interview has become important evidence at Mr. Davis’s trial. He now disavows the remarks.
As the trial draws to a close this week, prosecutors, who lack key physical evidence, are relying heavily on the account that Mr. Davis gave not only to the police but also to podcast interviewers and in a memoir. Although he said someone else had pulled the trigger, he described himself as having played a central role in the killing.
At the same time, prosecutors at the trial have not embraced Mr. Davis’s contention that Mr. Combs had a role in the murder, including by offering $1 million to have Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight killed. They did not mention it in their opening statement, and nothing said at the trial so far suggests Mr. Combs was ever a subject of the investigation after the case was reopened in 2018.
So as closing arguments begin on Monday, jurors will have to decide how to parse the credibility of Mr. Davis’s account, part of which is at the core of the prosecution’s case and part of which has, so far, been left on the periphery.
“They’re basically asking the jury to give a lot of credit to some of the statements Mr. Davis has made and to ignore other statements about his motive,” said Paul Butler, a criminal law professor at Georgetown University and a former prosecutor.
A spokesman for Mr. Combs declined to comment. When Mr. Davis’s account of his involvement was first publicly aired 15 years ago, Mr. Combs called it “pure fiction and completely ridiculous.”
Mr. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty to one count of murder with a deadly weapon, and he has disavowed his previous accounts of his role in the shooting, saying that he had nothing to do with it.
His lawyer, Michael Sanft, said during the trial that investigators who heard Mr. Davis’s story in 2008 did not charge him then because they knew he was “full of crap.” Mr. Davis has said he told a sensational, invented story in his book, which was published in 2019, and to podcasters under the belief that he had immunity from prosecution.
Gesturing to a screen showing a single word — “bullshit” — Mr. Sanft told jurors that his client was “known to do this.”
Throughout the three-week trial, prosecutors have presented the murder as part of an eruption of tensions between two rival gangs from Compton, Calif., that had become entangled with warring record labels.
The prosecution has acknowledged in court papers that Mr. Davis’s memoir includes inaccuracies and is “prone to hyperbole,” but they contend that its general thrust is true and supported by witnesses who corroborated the surge in gang tensions that preceded the shooting.
In the mid-1990s, Mr. Combs was an emergent record producer whose New York-based Bad Boy Records was behind ascendant rap stars such as the Notorious B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace.
But in the rising genre of gangsta rap, Bad Boy had a clear challenger: Mr. Knight’s Death Row Records, based in Los Angeles.
Tensions began to escalate in 1994, after Mr. Shakur was shot during a robbery in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. He publicly cast suspicion on Mr. Combs and Mr. Wallace, and they denied having had anything to do with the attack.
Months later, Mr. Knight — who signed Mr. Shakur to Death Row in 1995 — publicly insulted Mr. Combs in a speech at an awards show. Unconfirmed rumors then circulated that Mr. Combs was connected to a shooting that killed a friend of Mr. Knight’s in Atlanta. In 1996, months before he was killed, Mr. Shakur released an aggressive diss track called “Hit ’Em Up,” which threatened Mr. Combs and Mr. Wallace by name.
“That pissed him off,” Mr. Davis later told the police of Mr. Combs.
Prosecutors say that amid the hostility, the labels used rival gangs for security, with Death Row relying on members of the Mob Piru Bloods. When Bad Boy would travel to the West Coast, it would call in members of the South Side Compton Crips, with which Mr. Davis had been affiliated, according to prosecutors.
On Sept. 7, 1996, both sides were in Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson prizefight. According to the account Mr. Davis shared with the police and other interviewers, a spate of violence between the gangs led to a beating of his nephew, Orlando Anderson, shortly after the fight. Jurors saw security footage of Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight participating in that attack.
Seeking retribution, Mr. Davis has said, he obtained a .40-caliber Glock pistol, and a group of fellow Crips pursued the rapper and his boss. Driving around in a white Cadillac, they happened upon Mr. Shakur and Mr. Knight driving in a black BMW, according to Mr. Davis.
He later told the police that his nephew opened fire from the back seat, though other accounts suggest it may have been the man sitting beside him, Deandrae Smith. A bullet grazed Mr. Knight. Mr. Shakur was hit four times and died in a hospital days later.
Investigators quickly turned up details about the recent gang confrontations, and public speculation swirled about a connection to the rap feud. The fatal shooting of Mr. Wallace months later only intensified scrutiny on Mr. Combs’s record label.
But Mr. Combs, who was not in Las Vegas that night, had consistently denied hiring Crips for security.
“The misconception is that because we’re young and we’re Black, we’re not handling business just like anybody else,” he said in a 1998 television interview.
When Mr. Davis spoke to the police in 2008, he was facing possible prosecution on drug charges, and he gave investigators his account of Mr. Shakur’s murder with the understanding that he could not be prosecuted based on what he told them. Though he said Mr. Combs had offered money for the hit, he said he never received any.
Daryn Dupree, a former detective who was among the officers who interviewed Mr. Davis in 2008, testified at the trial that investigators had tried to corroborate his account.
He said Mr. Davis became a confidential informant and flew with detectives to New York to try to reestablish a connection with an associate who had introduced him to Mr. Combs and who, according to Mr. Davis’s account, provided him with the gun used in the shooting. But the associate was ill, and Mr. Davis was unable to renew the relationship, Mr. Dupree testified, so their plan fell apart.
In 2011, Mr. Davis’s account of Mr. Combs’s involvement became public through a book by Greg Kading, a former detective who had been at the interview.
Mr. Davis repeated the story in an interview in 2017 with documentary filmmakers, and again in his memoir, which was accompanied by a media tour.
The cascade of public statements helped convince prosecutors to bring the case against Mr. Davis. By that point, he was the only person alive who was said to have been in the white Cadillac that night. He was indicted on the murder charge in September 2023.
Two months later, Mr. Combs was sued by Cassie Ventura, a former girlfriend and singer on his label who accused him of years of abuse.
A series of lawsuits soon followed, as did a federal criminal investigation in New York. That led to more immediate problems for Mr. Combs than the case now unfolding in Las Vegas.
Discussion about this post