Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is Stay Tuned in Brief, I’m Preet Bharara. On September 29th, Las Vegas police officers arrested Dwayne “Keffe D” Davis, who was charged with orchestrating the murder of famed rapper Tupac Shakur more than 27 years ago. Davis’s arrest comes after more than a decade of speculation about his role in the killing, fueled in no small part by Davis’s own quasi confessions. Joining me to discuss the saga of Tupac’s death and this arrest, is former Los Angeles Police Department, detective Greg Kading, who led the task force at Secured Davis’s initial 2009 admission to being involved in the murder. Detective Kading, welcome to the show.

Greg Kading:

Good morning. Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

So I know since this arrest, as you were saying before we hit record, your phone’s been ringing a lot because of your involvement. But let’s go back and start kind of at the beginning. I hate to say this, but there might be some people listening who are not so familiar with Tupac. Could you explain who he was and how big a deal and influence he was in the rap world?

Greg Kading:

Sure. Tupac is a rap icon. He’s the rapper that everybody aspires to be. He was a poet, he was a rapper, he was an actor. He was a figurehead in the Black community as somebody who could potentially lead movements. He was huge. And all this before being 25 years old.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, he died at 25. Look, I listened to a lot of Tupac in the early nineties myself. So he was killed, and we’ll get to that in a moment, in 1996 in Las Vegas on the Strip, could you explain what is known about who he was feuding with and who his antagonists were before he was killed?

Greg Kading:

Sure. And to kind of set the stage a little bit. He was making a name for himself, or he had a name for himself, but he was really kind of a rising star in New York. He ran into some problems out there. He felt that the people back there didn’t have his back and that they were betraying him. He got himself into some trouble with a young lady, went to prison over that on some accusations of sexual assault. And then at that time there was a record company out in Los Angeles called Death Row Records being headed by a guy named Suge Knight. And they knew of Tupac’s potential as a music artist. And so Suge Knight approached Tupac in prison in Rikers Island in New York and said, if we can get you out on bond, would you then come to our record label and produce three albums?

The agreement was made and they put up a million dollar bond in order to get Tupac out of jail prior to his trial. And he came out to the West Coast and then he just started to produce massive amounts of music, many of them becoming huge hits. And so that’s how he attached himself and got in bed, so to speak, with Suge Knight and Death Row Records. Their adversary was an East Coast record company called Bad Boy. Bad Boy was a hip hop label being headed by a guy named Puffy Combs, commonly known as P Diddy. And there was this growing beef between the CEOs, Suge and Puffy, and a beef growing between the artists, Tupac and Biggie, and a beef growing between just the labels themselves. So that’s how it all started.

Preet Bharara:

So now let’s fast forward to Tupac’s death. Could you explain what is known about what happened?

Greg Kading:

Sure. And it is all this conflict that was going on for almost two years between these labels and ultimately Tupac was in Las Vegas with Suge Knight and other members of Death Row, including Suge Knight’s criminal associates, gang members from a blood gang from Compton, California. Well, meanwhile, there was some Crips that were in Las Vegas at the same time, and those Crips had associated themselves with Bad Boy records, the rival of Suge Knight and Tupac. And so there was an incident where a fight occurred in the lobby of a casino. Tupac had sucker punched a young gang member by the name of Orlando Anderson, and that set everything in motion for the retaliation wherein Tupac was shot and killed by that same individual that he had sucker punched and that the gang had stomped down.

Preet Bharara:

So describe a little bit what the scene was like as Tupac was in his BMW with various people including Suge Knight and a white Cadillac pulls up alongside. Just briefly tell that story.

Greg Kading:

So prior to the shooting, it was celebration. Tupac had just come from the Mike Tyson fight. He personally knew Mike Tyson. In fact, the song that Mike Tyson entered the ring to was a song that Tupac had written. So there was this huge sense of celebration. Mike Tyson had knocked out his opponent in like less than a minute. Everybody was headed over to a nightclub that Suge was establishing in Las Vegas. Mike Tyson was supposed to appear, Tupac was going to perform, it was going to be this really grand night. And as they were on their way to that location, there was a caravan of cars. They were yelling and the music was blaring. Girls were falling into this caravan, and lo and behold, this white Cadillac with these Crip gang members just creeps on up. They identify the car that Tupac and Sugar sitting in, and Orlando Anderson reaches out the window and begins to fire his handgun into the car striking Tupac several times, which caused his death.

Preet Bharara:

He died about a week later in the hospital, right?

Greg Kading:

Correct.

Preet Bharara:

So that’s a big, huge event, a homicide. You’ve worked a lot of homicides. What was the immediate investigation like and how did you become involved at some point?

Greg Kading:

The immediate investigation was chaos. There was two crime scenes. There was the location where the shooting took place at an intersection, and so there’s cars going and everyone’s trying to figure out what just happened. Bystanders, parked vehicles had been struck by bullets. So you had that scene itself, but then as the shooting was taking place, Suge Knight immediately drove away trying to get out of the line of fire. So he jumps a median and goes about a mile down the road before he pulls over. Well, the law enforcement is aware of a shooting because it’s coming out on the radio, but they don’t know if Suge Knight and his crew are the shooters. They don’t know if they’ve exchanged gunfire with somebody. They don’t know if they’re victims. So it’s very chaotic and because of the nature of the people that Suge Knight is associating himself with, and that Tupac is so does shading himself with, nobody’s cooperating with law enforcement, nobody saw anything. All they know is Tupac’s been shot. And so law enforcement isn’t getting the kind of information they really need to start to identify the suspects.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m going to jump ahead to something that I know you’ve said about Suge Knight, who as you’ve described, was present in Tupac’s car and drove it a mile away. You said recently, If there’s anybody in the world to blame for this taking 27 years to solve it’s Suge Knight, he knew the moment it happened, who did it, and all Suge had to do when Las Vegas PD asked him to come in and sit down for an interview, all he had to do was say, “They pulled up alongside, I looked right across the car, I saw Keffe D in the front seat. That’s Davis.” That’s all he had to say. “I saw Keffe D.” That alone, that witness statement would’ve changed everything because one of the reasons we’re talking and the people are calling you up, is to ask the question, why did it take 27 years to solve this very notorious murder or to make any arrest in this case? Can you elaborate on what you meant when you said that about Suge Knight? What would his motivation have been not to talk?

Greg Kading:

Well, he comes from a street culture and that street culture of Compton and that gang subculture doesn’t cooperate with law enforcement. They consider it snitching. And even when they’ve lost a loved one, they still don’t want to be the one who cooperates with law enforcement in order to get justice in that case, they would rather take matters into their own hands and handle things on the street. And so that’s exactly what happened in this case. Suge Knight knew Keffe D, he knew Dwayne Davis. He saw him and knew immediately who it was in that car.

So if he had just simply told Las Vegas investigators, Hey, it was the South Side Crips. It was Dwayne Keffe Davis that would’ve given them the evidence they needed, the eyewitness evidence they needed to round everybody up and solve the case. They always knew Orlando Anderson was the primary suspect. He had the motive. He was the guy that was just beaten down by Tupac. He was an established bonafide gang member. They knew that he was the most likely culprit, but they couldn’t prove it. And so that’s why it languished for years and years and years until Keffe D finally confessed.

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to get to that confession in a moment, but was there ever any thought among the cops, I know it’s an uphill battle and it’s a long shot given what you’ve described, but thinking about charging someone like Suge Knight with obstruction?

Greg Kading:

I don’t know that they ever thought about doing that because of course they’re going to have to prove that he knew this and he would then just deny, oh, I didn’t see anything. So these are the games that Suge plays and the difficulties that law enforcement has when dealing with that type of mentality.

Preet Bharara:

So how did you become involved?

Greg Kading:

I became involved indirectly. So after Tupac was shot, six months later, another rapper by the name of Biggie Smalls, his true name was Christopher Wallace, but he was known as either Biggie Smalls or the Notorious BIG. He was a very, very prominent rapper that worked for that rival group over at Bad Boy Records in New York, and he gets killed at the Peterson Auto Museum. And March 9th, 1997, just six months after Tupac was murdered, he gets killed. Well, that case languishes for years and years and years until a cold case investigation begins to reinvigorate it. And that’s when I got involved as a cold case investigator on Biggie’s murder. But investigators always knew that the likelihood of the two murders having some connection were very strong. The way the murders went down was very similar, kind of drive-by shootings, gang members. So that’s how I got involved. And Keffe D, the individual who ultimately confesses in Tupac’s murder was also with Biggie the night that he was killed, he had been at the Peterson Auto Museum and fraternizing with Biggie. So he was a person of interest in that case also.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s go back to Keffe D and this confession you keep talking about. I presume you’re talking about statements he made to law enforcement many years after 1996, in 2009, under what we in law enforcement are familiar with, a proffer agreement. Can you explain what that is and why that confession didn’t immediately lead to the arrest and prosecution of Keffe D?

Greg Kading:

Sure. Keffe D had been interviewed about Biggie’s murder in the past and about Tupac’s murder in the past, and he just said, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what happened. It wasn’t us. And so we knew that in order to get him to fully disclose information that he knew, we would have to get leverage on him. So we developed a airtight drug case against him, which was going to have him facing 25 years to life.

So now we had this leverage in order to compel him to cooperate. So he gets an attorney and an agreement is made between Keffe D, his attorney, and the United States attorney who is overseeing this drug investigation. And they do what’s known as a proffer agreement. And that is where you can sit down and ask somebody who you believe is involved in criminal activity to answer your questions about whatever crimes you want to question them about. And they’re obligated to tell you the truth, but they have the protection of knowing that what they tell you about themselves won’t be used against them. You’ll use their information to conduct further investigation, if other people bring in information that implicates them that can be used. It’s not immunity. And that’s where people often get this confused.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but you can’t use against the person the statements that they’re making about themselves directly. But if you get other evidence, you can absolutely charge somebody even with respect to the things that they’re confessing, right?

Greg Kading:

That is correct. And also, if they violate the terms of that agreement, if they lie, or like in this case they go outside of the proffer agreement, outside of that law enforcement environment and begin to publicly boast about their role in the shooting, none of that is protected either.

Preet Bharara:

But what ordinarily happens is when you have a successful proffer, the target admits that they committed some crimes, they become prepared to testify against other people, and then in exchange for potential leniency, they will plead guilty to the things that they confessed about and then testify against other bigger fish that they have information on. None of that happened here.

Greg Kading:

You’re right. That is the typical course of action, and you’re right that that’s not what happened here.

Preet Bharara:

Why not?

Greg Kading:

Well, because A we wanted to then use Keffe D as an informant, so we wanted to further elaborate on the things that he said, find other evidence against other people, but we began to utilize him as an informant and went to New York to try to secure some incriminating statements against other co-conspirators. And as that was going on, the simultaneous investigation with Biggie Smalls came to a halt because we’d gotten a confession in that case also at near abouts the same time. And when we got that confession, and this turns into a much broader conversation about a civil case that was being lodged against the city of Los Angeles, that civil case was retracted based on the evidence that we developed in the Biggie case. And once that was done, the task force was dismantled. So we contacted Las Vegas and said, Hey, we’ve got this guy who’s confessed to being involved in your murder, and here he is. So they came out, we explained to him that there was a proffer agreement, and then we left everything in their hands.

Preet Bharara:

Now, fast forward to 2023, 14 years earlier, was this confession made under the protection of a proffer agreement as you’ve described, what is different between ’09 and 2014 that enables the Las Vegas police to arrest Keffe D?

Greg Kading:

Well, nothing happens really with Keffe D between 2009 and 2018, so nearly nine years go by, and then he decides that he’s going to go on a documentary called “The Death Row Chronicles.” It was a BET production, and he goes onto a documentary and begins to publicly confess about his role in the murder. After that, he writes a book called “Street Legend” about himself and about his exploits and confesses in the book to his role in the murder. And then after that, he begins to go on a series of podcasts and begins to incriminate him himself on those platforms. And so he’s continually publicly boasting now about being involved in the murder, and that’s what lands him in hot water.

Preet Bharara:

Can I ask you, on a scale of 1 to 10, and I know the answer, how dumb was that?

Greg Kading:

Oh, I don’t know if we can use this word anymore, but he’s so ignorant. He’s so ignorant. But that’s the interesting thing about Keffe D is that he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room.

Preet Bharara:

Is there any other precipitating factor other than over the course of years in the last period of time, he began openly confessing, and obviously those open confessions are not subject to any proffer agreement.

Greg Kading:

Correct. And so for five years now, he’s been speaking publicly about this.

Preet Bharara:

So I guess why did it take five? So after he confesses publicly a couple of times, do you have any visibility into the thinking of the Las Vegas authorities as to why now? I think you’ve mentioned that one key was a particular investigator.

Greg Kading:

I think there are three components to it, and this is speculation. Most certainly it was a very dogged investigator, a guy named Cliff Moag who decided that he’s going to solve this case before he retires, which he did. So there’s just the diligence of that investigator, but also there was just horrible optics for Las Vegas PD when you have somebody out publicly confessing and the perception is that Las Vegas doesn’t care evidently because nobody’s doing anything, and this guy’s bragging about it.

So that I’m sure put a little bit of a pressure on them because of the perception. And then lastly, I think that what they were probably thinking is why not just let him keep talking? Having them say it once? Yeah, that’s bad. Having him say it twice is worse. Having him say it five times, that’s really, so they’re allowing him to compound his situation and compound the amount of evidence against him. So I think it was a smart move maybe to delay things for a while and just let him keep talking. Because as you know, it’s very typical in law enforcement when somebody starts talking, just let him keep talking.

Preet Bharara:

Let him talk. That’s definitely true. But why can’t he say credibly, look, I’m kind of a punk. I was just bragging. It’s just puffery. The truth is I really didn’t know, I wasn’t there. And doesn’t it become like a, he said he said within the same person kind of issue?

Greg Kading:

That brings up a really interesting situation, a legal situation that will probably get argued out in court. So if he does that, if he says, Hey, I was just talking nonsense, I didn’t mean any of it. Well, that means he violated the proffer agreement.

Preet Bharara:

Right, because he lied.

Greg Kading:

Because he lied. And so he’s in a quagmire where-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not clear how that would play out in court because kind of it’s a conundrum a bit. So he confesses to a murder in a proffer that’s protected. Then he later says he was lying when he confessed publicly. So that, as you say, undoes the protection of the proffer agreement. But then what are you left with? You’re left with a statement that he will continue to claim was a lie.

Greg Kading:

What you’re going to end up doing, and which I think they’ll do rather easily, is shore everything up with some really strong circumstantial evidence. They’re going to shore it up with testimony from other gang members. They’re going to shore it up with testimony from people who saw Keffe D at the 662 club lying in wait. So there’s a lot of circumstantial information that they can use to show that he was telling the truth. In the proffer session he tells us things that were never made or known publicly, and only somebody that was there would know. And so that corroborates his presence.

Preet Bharara:

So the statements in the proffer have indicia of truth?

Greg Kading:

Correct.

Preet Bharara:

Do we have an understanding, a good understanding of who the shooter was?

Greg Kading:

We do, and it’s being debated recently only because there was a grand jury witness who said that he had spoken to one of the other occupants in the car, a guy named Deandre Smith, and according to this grand jury witness, Deandre Smith confessed that he had been the shooter.

Preet Bharara:

As opposed to Orlando Anderson?

Greg Kading:

As opposed to Orlando Anderson. I lean heavily back towards Orlando because that’s what Keffe D said. He was in the car. He is an eyewitness, and I believe that the things that he were telling us during our interview were accurate and true. And so when he says he handed the gun to Orlando Anderson and Orlando Anderson did the shooting, I believe it. The hearsay information doesn’t weigh as heavily in my mind. And also you have to keep in mind the gang culture. Orlando Anderson was the one that was stomped down. He was the one that was assaulted. It was his retaliation to get even for and within the gang culture, it’s his job to carry out that retaliation.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that you might become a witness at the trial?

Greg Kading:

Well, most certainly if they allow the proffer. If some event happens where they determine that the proffer can be made admissible, then yes, myself and other members of the task force will probably get called in.

Preet Bharara:

Has anyone told you, detective Kading, stop doing podcasts?

Greg Kading:

No. No.

Preet Bharara:

Sometimes people don’t like potential witnesses to be out talking about what might be a part of their future testimony, but I’m glad that you’re able to do this.

Greg Kading:

There are hundreds of hours of internet conversations already before Keffe D was ever arrested, so it’s not like I can hide from that.

Preet Bharara:

And you think, final question. You think that the Las Vegas authorities have a strong case and they will get a conviction even though it’s been 27 years?

Greg Kading:

I am optimistic. I’m very, very optimistic. I think that they dotted their i’s and crossed their t’s, and they really want to have, in fact, I don’t even think it’ll go to trial. I think once the judge agrees to allow his public statements in, the evidence is so overwhelming that it would be in his best interest to take a deal. So I think he would probably plead out.

Preet Bharara:

Detective Greg Kading, this has been a real pleasure and honor to speak to you. I will, just one final point, and it may be given your background and my background that this felt at times like a direct examination, a very excellent witness testifying under direct where my questions are basically what happened next. I remember, and I don’t know if people have said this to you, when I first became a prosecutor and was asking questions about how to conduct a direct examination, someone said, it’s very easy. You just say what happened? And then after they answer, you say, what happened next?

Greg Kading:

And then? And then? And then?

Preet Bharara:

It’s not quite as easy as that, but that’s the basic premise. In any event, thank you for your work on this and I wish you all the best.

Greg Kading:

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

For more analysis of legal and political issues making the headlines, become a member of the Cafe Insider. Members get access to exclusive content, including the weekly podcast I host with former US Attorney, Joyce Vance. Head to cafe.com/insider to sign up for a trial. That’s cafe.com/insider.

If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338. That’s 669-24-preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned in Brief is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Seper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producer is Matthew Billy. The audio producer is Nat Weiner. The editorial producers are David Kurlander, Noa Azulai, and Jake Kaplan. The production coordinator is Claudia Hernández, and the email marketing manager is Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.