For someone who’s been dead a decade and a half, Tupac Shakur sure does manage to stay in the news, doesn’t he? Earlier today we told you about the postumous release of a Tupac sex tape. Now a former LAPD homicide detective who investigated the murders of both Shakur and Biggie Smalls is out with a book that claims Diddy paid one million dollars to have Tupac killed, and then Suge Knight hired an assassin to take out Biggie in retaliation.
Reports LA Weekly:
Now, in the pages of his potentially game-changing self-published book Murder Rap, set for release Oct. 4, former Los Angeles Police Department Detective Greg Kading reveals that LAPD has been sitting on extensive tapes and documents containing confessions from key players behind the alleged assassinations of Shakur and Smalls (Wallace). LAPD higher-ups pulled Kading off the double investigation right when he was poised to drive it home, he says. Then they shut it down completely. An LAPD spokesman insists in an email that the case is still “active/ongoing” but that no further information is available. If true, this means the LAPD has only in the past couple of months revived the probe.
Perhaps luckily for the rappers’ families and fans still seeking closure, Kading made copies of nearly every investigative report and taped confession before he left LAPD. His explosive book details the behind-the-scenes failure by LAPD to bring Shakur’s and Smalls’ killers to justice.
Whoa! Now here’s the money shot(s)…
This is not the first time a gangster has done business at this Beverly Hills office building. It once served as the bullet-riddled headquarters of the now-defunct Death Row Records, run by Bloods with a strict policy of never talking to cops. But for Duane “Keffe D” Keith Davis, a shot caller for the Southside Crips, it now happens to be his lawyer’s office. And on this surreal morning on Dec. 18, 2008, Keffe D is going to snitch.
Keffe D tells the cops he was offered $1 million to kill Death Row rapper Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight, the label’s former CEO. The informant tells his interrogators in plain language, albeit at a cool street clip, that Sean Combs — then known as Puff Daddy, the ringmaster of Bad Boy Entertainment, Death Row Records’ bitter cross-country rival — commissioned Shakur’s legendary murder in Vegas in September 1996. (Knight would survive that night’s shooting with a bullet wound to the head.)
…
In a taped confession fully reviewed by L.A. Weekly, Keffe D says, “[Combs] took me downstairs and he’s like, ‘Man, I want to get rid of them dudes.’ … I was like, ‘We’ll wipe their ass out, quick. It’s nothing.’ … We wanted a million.” In another stunning confession, detailed in LAPD documents reviewed by the Weekly, the mother of one of Knight’s children, identified in Kading’s book as “Theresa Swann,” breaks down in tears, stating that the former Death Row boss gave her the money to pay Wardell “Poochie” Fouse — Knight’s close associate and a fellow member of the Mob Piru Bloods — to kill Smalls.
The confessions detailed in Kaling’s book clash with the long-standing theory — the one laid out in the documentary Biggie & Tupac — that Knight was responsible for both killings, killing Shakur because he owed Knight’s label unpaid royalties and was preparing to jump ship to another label, and then killing Biggie to make it all look like the stuff of a dumb East Coast/West Coast war. Additionally, a convicted murder currently in prison recently claimed that he was the one who killed Tupac at Diddy’s request.
Meanwhile, it’s still boggles my mind that nothing close to an arrest has been made in regards to either murder after all these years.
