He Investigated Tupac’s Murder. Keffe D’s Verdict ‘Feels Like Vindication’

Greg Kading paced the floor of his Southern California living room Monday, a bottle of champagne at the ready, as he waited for a courtroom livestream to carry the verdict in the Tupac Shakur murder trial. The former Los Angeles police detective led a task force that investigated the unsolved killings of Shakur and Christopher “Notorious B.I.G.” Wallace, and he’s widely credited with helping crack the decades-old Shakur case.

When jurors returned after just three hours and convicted former Compton gang leader Duane “Keffe D” Davis of first-degree murder in the 1996 drive-by shooting of Shakur , Kading popped the cork with his wife and adult son. They “polished off the whole bottle” in celebration, Kading tells Rolling Stone .

“I was really kind of surprised, shocked even, that it came back that quickly,” Kading says, speaking by phone. “When they gave the guilty verdict, I was just like, finally, yes. [The jurors] really got it. They were able to see through all the smoke, to see this case for what it is: Basically, Keffe talked himself into prison.”

Kading, 63, is among a small group of people most responsible for setting in motion the events that ultimately put Davis in the defendant’s chair for the closely watched two-week trial. In 2008, he and another task force detective, Daryn Dupree, suspected Davis knew something about the killing of the Notorious B.I.G. and approached him in his garage with an offer. Davis could potentially avoid a life sentence in a separate drug trafficking case by cooperating and telling investigators what he knew.

Davis denied any role in Biggie’s killing. But then, according to Dupree’s testimony at trial, he startled the detectives by saying, “We did the other one.” Davis later sat for a surreptitiously recorded and highly pivotal proffer interview with his lawyer present. On the recording, Davis described riding in a car with three other men, including his nephew Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, when they spotted Shakur in a black BMW driven by Death Row Records co-founder Suge Knight in Las Vegas on Sept. 7. 1996. Davis said he passed a loaded .40-caliber Glock to the back seat before Anderson opened fire amid an escalating feud between Davis’ South Side Compton Crips and the Mob Piru Bloods, a rival gang associated with Shakur and Knight. Editor’s picks The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

The proffer meant Davis’ statements during the interview couldn’t be used as evidence in a criminal case. But after Kading left the LAPD in 2010, disillusioned by the effective dismantling of the task force, he published a book titled Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations . The self-published book revealed contents of Davis’ confession and led to a documentary. Prosecutors argued Monday that Kading’s disclosures angered Davis.