Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (20 page)

Biggie, on the other hand, seemed to have thrown caution entirely to the wind, at one point interrupting the conversation to ask if Keffe D had any “chronic” he’d be willing to trade for a bottle of Cristal champagne.

Yet, for his part, Keefe D remained alert to potential trouble, if not from federal authorities then from the various gang factions that thronged the Petersen’s Grand Salon. “There were a lot of Blood motherfuckers there,” he told us, “and Death Row, too. DJ Quik and two singers named Jewell and Lashelle, who was Suge’s cousin and had been signed by him. I told Puffy to watch his ass, but he didn’t pay no mind. He told me the two bitches had come to New York to see him about being on Bad Boy ’cause they was tired of working in Suge’s stable.”

Keffe D was skeptical. He knew that Jewell, an aspiring R&B vocalist, had strong links to Death Row and posed a potential threat. She had shot her live-in boyfriend in 1993 and had subsequently been arrested for helping to launder millions in a drug operation. Neither charge stuck. When asked by investigators in that case what her connection to Death Row was, she replied only that she had provided services, whatever that meant. Keffe D apparently suspected that the service Jewell was providing that night was as an operative for Suge, casing the Petersen party.

Moments before the fire marshal announced that the party was being shut down, Keffe D claimed that Puffy had asked to meet them back at the hotel. “I was fixin’ to leave after that,” he continued, “when I got told that Biggie was shot.”

“Who did it?” I asked, seeing no harm in reiterating the obvious question.

Keffe D gave me an impatient look. “I told you,” he repeated. “That wasn’t us.” There was silence around the table. It was clear that we had gone as far as we were going to go on the subject of the Wallace homicide.

The implications of Keffe D’s statement seemed clear to us. If he had nothing to say about Biggie, then he
had
to be talking about Tupac. He had been present at both murders and it was the only part of his story that would be remotely mind-blowing enough. The task facing us at that point was to determine if he was telling the truth or simply stringing us along.

I reached into my briefcase and produced the statements Keffe D had made to the FBI in prison after his arrest in 1997 on federal drug charges. In it, he had given his version of what happened in Las Vegas the night Tupac was killed, claiming that he had driven to the city on the day of the boxing match in the company of his brother Kevin, Cory Edwards, and other assorted Crips, including Terrence “Bubble Up” Brown.

After checking in to the MGM Grand Hotel, Keffe D continued, the crew had purchased tickets for the fight from a scalper. After the match, they had all gone to a restaurant where an associate informed Keefe D of the beating his nephew had received from Tupac and his Death Row enforcers. Baby Lane, Keffe D had told agents, arrived earlier in the day, driving out separately in a rented Cadillac. His companions on the trip were fellow Crips, Terrence Brown, who had been convicted of numerous felonies, and Dre Smith, who would be dead in a few years from complications due to morbid obesity. The trio checked into the Excalibur Hotel.

Subsequently meeting up with his bruised and mortified nephew, Keffe D claimed to have counseled caution. Revenge would have to wait, he supposedly told Baby Lane. There were too many cops beefing up security for the championship bout. They could settle the score once they got back to Compton. But they never got the chance. Somebody beat them to it.

Baby Lane had every reason to want Tupac and Suge dead, the FBI interviewer persisted. If he didn’t do it, who did?

Keffe D denied any knowledge of the killer’s identity. When asked by the agent to speculate, he suggested with a straight face that Compton police officers, hired by Suge, had done the deed. When pressed as to what possible motive Suge might have for killing his star client, and putting himself in the line of fire, Keffe D theorized that Tupac had threatened to leave Death Row Records and Suge hired the cops to kill him for his disloyalty.

As ridiculous on its face as such a reason might have seemed, it had gained considerable traction in the years since Tupac’s death. Produced in 1997 by Tupac’s Las Vegas bodyguard, Frank Alexander, a DVD documentary titled
Tupac: Assassination
went to great lengths to make the same case, falling well short of producing much credible evidence. Not that it made a difference. That was Keffe D’s story, the one he had stuck to for almost ten years.

We waited as the gangster finished perusing the statement he had made behind bars to federal authorities. As he turned over the last page, he threw us all a scornful look. “That’s all bullshit,” he said.

It was as if, in that moment, we could feel the ice finally beginning to break apart, freeing the long frozen case. Keffe D had admitted that the tale he’d spun for the FBI was a lie, which meant that there must be another story. One that might actually be true.

CHAPTER
16

“Was That Us?”

T
WO WEEKS LATER,
with the morning sun streaming through the wide conference room windows, we met with Keffe D again. Higgins’s law firm had recently moved into the vacated Death Row Records headquarters and it wasn’t hard to imagine that this same space might have been the infamous Red Room where Suge Knight held court.

This time around, the one and only topic up for discussion was the murder of Tupac, which, by process of elimination, we had concluded had been Keffe D’s bargaining chip all along. We asked him to take it from the top, knowing full well how difficult it is to find the starting point in any gang narrative. Aside from the famously permeable nature of memory, which sometimes accounts for the wide divergences in eyewitness testimony, the exploits of gangsters often bleed into one another, sometimes literally. Characters and events overlap as friends and enemies regularly swap places backward and forward through time. It was up to us to sort through it all.

Sure enough, Keefe D began his story in 1991, “back in the day,” when the South Side Crips would play weekend baseball with the Santana Block crew in a Compton park, the winners taking home a case of Dom Perignon. It was at a time when the Crips were consolidating their national drug distribution networks, and at one of these games, Keffe D told us, that he had been introduced to a New York-based dealer named Eric “Zip” Martin, also known as Equan Williams.

Zip operated a Manhattan limousine service and a Harlem nightclub called Zip Code. According to Keffe D, he made frequent trips to Los Angeles to find suppliers for a thriving East Coast drug business with Keefe D eventually furnishing kilos of cocaine to Martin. He told us that at one point he flew out and stayed in Zip’s Jersey City apartment while making arrangements for the transport of large quantities of PCP from Compton.

Two years later, our witness continued, Zip was back in Los Angeles and invited his business partner along for a Black Entertainment Television function at the Paradise Club, a trendy Westside nightspot. According to Keffe D, Zip had carefully cultivated connections in the music industry, and it was there that he first introduced Keffe D to Puffy Combs. On the verge of launching his Bad Boy entertainment empire, Puffy had already been credited with discovering the superstar diva Mary J. Blige, who also made an appearance at the event.

Keefe D claimed that he had quickly put himself in Puffy’s good graces when he supposedly lent out his vintage 1964 Chevy LS for the music video of “Can U Get with It,” the debut single by a young vocalist named Usher, who Combs was producing. Such a vehicle does indeed appear in the video, driven by Puffy himself and when the vehicle was damaged during the filming, Keffe D asserted, Combs made sure he was reimbursed for the $2,500 repair bill.

Keffe D insisted that their relationship flourished as Puffy’s growing fame increasingly brought him to Los Angeles. He asserted that, while in town, Combs met with him on several occasions at Greenblatt’s Deli, a famous eatery on Sunset Boulevard adjacent to the Laugh Factory comedy club. There, over corned beef and coleslaw lunches, the topic of conversation, as recounted by Keefe D, became increasingly focused on the rivalry between the East and West Coast rap factions. After the Quad Studios ambush, Tupac had not been shy in publicly declaring that Puffy had orchestrated the attack. Suge Knight would level similar accusations against Combs regarding the death of his friend and bodyguard Jake Robles in an Atlanta nightclub.

But the feud had really escalated when Suge appeared on a New York stage during an awards show sponsored by
The Source
magazine. In a cutting reference to Puffy’s spotlight-grabbing tendency, Suge had told the crowd, “Any hip-hop artists out there who want to be an artist and stay a star, and don’t want to have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, and on all the records…come to Death Row.”

Not long afterward, Keffe D continued, he and Zip were driving through Compton together when Martin’s cell phone rang. It was Puffy, and he wanted to speak to Keffe D. “He was like, ‘Man, you think it’s cool to come out there for our concerts?’” Keefe D recounted to us. “I’m talking about Big Boy — the CEO.” The reference was clearly to Suge Knight and Keffe D knew it immediately. “I told him, ‘That boy ain’t nothing. Come on, we got your back…just give me about forty-five or fifty tickets.’”

It was a story supported by a statement we would subsequently take from Denvonta Lee, who told us that he had witnessed Keffe D passing out concert tickets to Bad Boy Entertainment events. For that reason, he assumed, the comps had come from Combs.

To our ears, the twin account had the ring of truth. We believed that Puffy had used Crips as security for the Southern California leg of his 1995 Summer Jam tour. And if Keefe D was to be believed, it was a fistful of tickets that had paid for their services.

Given Puffy’s unequivocal denial that he had ever compensated Crips for security, there is inevitably an element of ambiguity in the conflicting accounts. Could handing out freebees be considered payment for protection? In short, did Puffy “hire” a Crip posse?

It seemed to be a distinction without a difference in Keffe D’s mind. “He gave us the tickets and I brought the crew,” he told us. “That’s when we brought out the forces…we went up there deep.”

According to Keefe D’s story, he and a large contingent of Crips had gathered in Combs’ hotel suite prior to the Anaheim concert. Aside from his regular security team and the gang contingent, Puffy allegedly told Keefe D that he had several trained Navy SEALs as backup in an adjacent room.

“Was he worried about something happening?” Daryn asked.

“He was scared to death,” Keffe D retorted. “That’s when he said it in front of all these people…he said he’d give anything for them dudes’ heads.”

Daryn and I looked at each other. Had we just heard what we thought we heard? Was Keffe D saying that Puffy Combs had made a solicitation for the murder of Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur?

“Who was there that day?” I asked.

“At Anaheim?” Keffe D replied. “Everybody. The whole fuckin’ neighborhood.”

I leaned forward. “Give us five names of people who would say, ‘Yeah, we heard Puffy say that.’”

He identified Michael “Owl” Dorrough, Corey Edwards, and Dirt Rock as present at the scene. “All of them will tell you,” he insisted. “He said it in front of all them people. I couldn’t believe it. A whole room full of Crips.”

“Tell us what happened,” I pressed, “that made it something other than him just frustrated and boasting? What made it specific, like, ‘Hey, I’m serious, I want you guys to kill these guys.’”

“When he told me at Greenblatt’s,” Keffe D answered promptly. He went on to describe an alleged encounter at the delicatessen during which Puffy had pulled him aside. “He was like, ‘I want to get rid of them dudes.’” When Daryn asked him whether Puffy always referred to Suge and Tupac together, Keffe D nodded, adding that Tupac had been added to the hit list “after he made that record.”

“After ‘Hit ’Em Up,’ came out,” Daryn specified, referring to the 1996 single on which Tupac had called out Puffy and Biggie by name.

“Yeah,” Keffe D answered. “That pissed him off…I was like, ‘Man, we’ll wipe their ass out, quick…it’s nothing. Consider that done.’ We wanted a million dollars.”

“Who brought up the amount?” Holcomb asked.