Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (19 page)

Placed on a ventilator and a respirator, Tupac was put into a drug-induced coma while friends and family gathered for a twenty-four-hour bedside vigil. His mother, Afeni Shakur, received the grim news in the Stone Mountain, Georgia, home that her son had purchased for her. She arrived the next morning, accompanied by family members. Joining them in what had clearly become a deathwatch was, among others, Mike Tyson, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the entertainer MC Hammer, who arrived at the hospital in a Hummer.

Suge Knight also took his turn at the bedside of the comatose Tupac. His wounds had turned out to be superficial, but he had other problems to deal with. As a convicted felon he had been required to register with the local authorities within twenty-four hours of his arrival. Even as Tupac was struggling for breath, Suge was being fingerprinted and photographed, his presence in Las Vegas duly noted in Nevada’s convicted-felon registry.

There was another unlikely visitor at University Medical Center in the hours immediately following the shooting. It was Kevin Hackie, the one-time Compton School Police Department officer who had been Russell Poole’s primary source in fingering the rogue Rampart officers as Death Row operatives. He had since gone on to work at Wright Way security and had been present at the drive-by on Flamingo Road. Materializing outside the Intensive Care Unit, he had identified himself as an FBI agent investigating the shooting. Hackie did indeed have a link to the agency, but it was hardly what he claimed. In 1996 he had offered himself as an informant to the Bureau, an aspiration that had apparently gone to his head. “There is concern that Hackie is prone to exaggeration and is unstable,” his FBI handler later wrote in a telling understatement. Hackie himself would later confirm his unstable state when, during a subsequent court proceeding, he told an attorney, “I am stressed out and have been on medication for the past five years. My memory is bad. I probably won’t even remember our conversation tomorrow.” Given his admitted condition, it is perhaps not surprising that the onetime school cop was now attempting an impersonation in an attempt to take charge of the high-profile murder case.

It was all part of a circus atmosphere ramping up even as Tupac’s life ebbed away. Jesse Jackson, for example, was front and center in the media whirlwind that had descended as the news spread, busily and visibly organizing a prayer vigil in churches around the city. “Sometimes the lure of violent culture is so magnetic that even when one overcomes it with material success, it continues to call,” he intoned. “We need to understand and know about the background of this man and where he came from.” It was an abrupt about-face for Jackson, who had once vehemently denounced gangsta rap from the pulpit.

Wherever Tupac had come from, it was clear enough where he was heading. While refusing to speculate on his chances for survival, the head of the hospital’s trauma unit let slip that only one in five patients who had sustained such wounds was likely to recover. “It’s a very fatal injury,” he told reporters. “Statistically, it carries a very high mortality rate. A patient may die from lack of oxygen or may bleed to death in the chest.”

In a last-ditch attempt to stanch the internal hemorrhaging, doctors removed Tupac’s right lung. Shortly afterward his heart failed. Physicians were able to get it pumping, only to have it give out again. It was at that point that Tupac’s mother intervened, making the agonizing decision that, if his heart stopped a third time, the doctors should make no further attempts to revive him.

“I felt it was really important for Tupac,” Afeni Shakur later explained on ABC’s
Prime Time Live
, “who fought so hard to have a free spirit…I rejoiced with him, with the release of his spirit.”

On Friday, September 13, 1996, six frantic days after the drive-by, Tupac’s spirit was indeed released as he succumbed at last to his insuperable wounds. But it was hardly the act of closure that his mother might have hoped for. By his death, Shakur had become a legend, one that grew to take on a life of its own in the years that followed. It was a myth wrapped in a mystery, gripping the public imagination by posing more questions than it could ever hope to answer.

CHAPTER
15

“That Wasn’t Us”

T
HERE WAS A GRIM SYMMETRY
to the murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, an echo chamber amplifying the cross talk of conspiracy, which had lost none of its persuasive power over the years.

It was hard
not
to draw a direct link: both victims were huge stars, at the height of their appeal, with long and lucrative careers in front of them. Both had been at the forefront of a street-level musical revolution, one that had taken the world by storm, celebrated and condemned in equal measure. Both had been killed by semiautomatic gunfire sprayed from the window of a passing car. And both, ultimately, were seen as martyrs of the gang wars that had engulfed rap music in bloody and pointless turf battles, a conflict that their own talents had helped to foster and fuel.

As with any celebrity gone before their time, the intertwined deaths of Biggie and Tupac had become the subject of rampant speculation, including the inevitable rumors that they had, in fact, actually survived the assassination attempts. Tales were told of Biggie hiding out in Compton, having taken on the alias of Guerilla Black, who turned out to be a South Side rapper bearing a striking resemblance to Wallace that he was not shy about exploiting. Tupac was supposedly spotted in 2009, drinking hand grenades in a New Orleans bar. Chuck D, of the pioneering hip-hop group Public Enemy, became one of the more vocal conspiracy theorists. He pointed out that, among other suspicious occurrences, no pictures had been taken of Tupac in the hospital and that, on the cover of
The Don Killuminati
,
he appeared in the guise of Jesus Christ, suggesting, for anyone with eyes to see, an imminent return.

It was only natural that those who mourned the loss of Tupac and Biggie would hang on to the hope of resurrection, all the more so since the circumstances of their deaths had for so long remained unresolved. Yet one factor of the twin tragedies remained demonstrably true: Tupac and Biggie were worth as much dead as alive… perhaps even more. Beginning the year after his murder, no fewer than five posthumous Tupac albums would be released on Amaru Entertainment, the label his mother started. They included
RU Still Down (Remember Me)
, which sold four million copies, and
Until the End of Time
, which racked up sales in excess of five million.

Puffy Combs was only slightly less industrious in capitalizing on the legacy of Bad Boy’s fallen hero. In the summer of 1997, Combs released his own solo album, the Grammy Award-winning
No Way Out
, featuring Biggie rapping on five tracks. Two years later, Combs came out with
Born Again
, a collection of previously unreleased Biggie material grafted onto newly recorded duet tracks with Missy Elliot, Ice Cube, and Snoop Dogg. The album sold three million copies. In 2005, Combs repeated the concept on
Duets: The Final Chapter
, featuring vocal pairings with Eminem and Biggie’s former wife, Faith Evans. It was followed in 2009 by the well-received biopic
Notorious
, co-produced by Combs and Biggie’s mother.

One aspect of Biggie’s legacy that Combs seemed to steer well clear of, however, was the murder itself. According to an article in
Rolling Stone
, the music mogul not only proved less than fully cooperative in the homicide investigation, but also appeared to discourage others from assisting in the inquiries. The magazine cited Eugene Deal’s claim that, after Puffy learned the bodyguard had spoken to police, Combs refused to hire him again. Gregory Young is also quoted, asserting that Combs had warned him and others, “if our names even appear on a witness list, we’re out of a job.” Voletta Wallace, Biggie’s mother, also weighed in on rumors of Puffy’s intimidating tactics. “If Puffy has been threatening people with the loss of their jobs for cooperating with the police,” she told
Rolling Stone
, “I want that made public.”

As the appeal of Biggie and Tupac endured, so too did the belief in a connection between the two shootings. As the task force entered its third year of intensive investigation, we had become increasingly convinced that the trail we were following would sooner or later merge the tragedy on Flamingo Road with the one on Wilshire Boulevard. Yet the stubborn question remained: what exactly
was
the link? In many ways, we had been groping for that answer from the very first day of the reopened investigation. It had been a long, slow, and frustrating process, with more than its share of dead ends. Tray Lane, Corey Edwards, Michael Dorrough: each had led into a blind alley, and we were no closer to untangling the puzzle than when we’d begun. We hoped our luck would change when Keffe D finally started opening up.

It was that air of expectancy that hung over the conference room in Wayne Higgins’s office on the morning of December 18, 2008, when Daryn and I, joined again by Bill Holcomb and Jeff Bennett, sat down for our first follow-up meeting with Keffe D. We had come to hear what he had promised would blow our “fuckin’ minds.” It was a tantalizing prospect. At the same time, we couldn’t help but wonder how useful his story would turn out to be. As he had whispered to me in the hallway prior to our initial sit-down, he didn’t “know nothin’ about what you want to talk to me for.” As we had told Wayne Higgins, what we wanted to talk to him for was concrete information about the Biggie Smalls homicide. Was that now off the table?

Years of experience had taught me that detective work is as much about improvisation as it is about investigation. We had worked long and hard to compel Keffe D’s cooperation. What form that cooperation took, and what direction it might lead, was something we couldn’t foresee. We had to go where he took us.

After some pleasantries, we cut to the chase. Did he know anything about the Biggie Smalls murder? He just shrugged. “I already told you,” he said. “That one wasn’t us.” Daryn and I looked at each other. Were we reading the same thing between the same lines? If Davis was denying complicity in “that one,” was there another one that, by implication, he
was
involved in?

When Keffe D shrugged his shoulders it was like lifting the heavy burden of a man who knew too much about too many things. He stared at us with his heavy-lidded eyes.

“What can you tell us about this deal?” Daryn persisted.

A moment passed. Then another. “I saw Puffy at the House of Blues the night before it went down,” he answered at last. “He told me to come out for the big ball game at the school.”

We knew immediately what he was referring to: the celebrity basketball match that Biggie, along with Lil’ Caesar and the Bad Boy security head, Paul Offord, had attended at Cal State Dominguez Hills on the day of the Petersen party. Just the fact that Combs had invited him to the event told us something. Keffe D was still seemingly in the good graces of the music mogul he had first met by providing a Crip security contingent for the West Coast leg of a Bad Boy concert tour in 1995.

“Who else was at the game?” I asked.

“Snoop Dogg. Kurupt,” he answered, naming two prominent Death Row artists, who despite their association with Suge’s label were Crip-affiliated. It was for that reason, Keffe D claimed, that he gave them a “pass.”

“Who else?” Daryn pressed.

“Puffy. Biggie.” After the game, he told us, Keffe D received invitations to the Vibe event and that evening he arrived at the Petersen in the company of his nephew Baby Lane, Dre Smith and other major South Side Crips.

Inside the museum, Keffe D spotted Biggie and Puffy around their ringside table at the dance floor. He approached them and was waved through security by Combs. “Puff seemed all nervous,” he continued. “He said the feds were all over him and he didn’t want me to catch his heat.” We wondered at first if he was referring to the ongoing investigation out of Teaneck, looking into narcotics and weapons allegations against Biggie and that, perhaps, Puffy felt himself to be a target as well. But as we listened, Daryn and I couldn’t help but wonder if Puffy wasn’t just trying to distance himself from a gangster of Keffe D’s stature. As his star rose, the music mogul had less and less reason to associate himself with hardcore gangbangers and we had no reason to believe that the “heat” in Keffe D’s account was actually generated by the New Jersey investigation or was simply a figment of Puffy’s imagination.