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Arrest in Tupac Shakur Murder Case Extends the U.S. Intelligence Cover-up
In late September 2023, police arrested a man they say ordered the murder of rap icon Tupac Shakur in 1996. This arrest comes after decades of murders and cover-up of the globally loved rapper and film star whose work at bringing peace between rival gangs threatened the CIA’s racist, imperialist drug-trafficking agenda.
After the September 29 arrest of Duane “Keefe D” Davis, the Associated Press called Davis “the last living suspect” in Tupac’s murder.
There is additional evidence lending credence to the belief that Death Row Records label director Marion “Suge” Knight, attorney Dave Kenner and security director Reggie Wright, Jr., were leading suspects in collaboration with U.S. intelligence.[1]
LA’s Death Row Records a CIA Front for Drug Trafficking, Opposing Gang Peace?
Tupac’s Black Panther extended family, including his Harlem Panther leader mother, Afeni Shakur, his Republic of New Afrika leader stepfather Mutulu Shakur, and his Los Angeles Black Panther leader godfather, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, inspired the rap icon’s activism.[2]
By the time Tupac was 17, the New Afrikan Panther Party, attempting to replicate the Black Panthers, elected him their national leader.[3]
After Tupac’s major label rap debut at 21 in 1992, along with a starring film role, he took on a new activist “Thug Life” plan that had him pretending to be a “gangsta” in order to appeal to gangs and politicize them. This was part of the highly successful gang peace truce movement.[4]
U.S. intelligence, which had used their FBI Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) to murderously target Tupac’s Black Panther extended family in the 1960s and 1970s, now appeared to target Tupac and his gang peace truce movement.[5]
Former FBI Agent Wes Swearingen reported COINTELPRO’s continuance into the 1990s.[6]
Many books and documentaries have presented the research on how CIA programs such as CHAOS and MK-ULTRA colluded with the FBI’s COINTELPRO against the Panthers.[7]
Gary Webb documented, in his viral Dark Alliance newspaper series and book, that CIA operatives trafficked cheap cocaine to “Freeway” Ricky Ross, and Death Row Records founder Michael “Harry-O” Harris was Ross’s understudy.[8]
David Kenner was Harris’s lawyer and Death Row’s real owner, owning its umbrella group, Godfather Entertainment.[9]
When Harris went to prison, Kenner hired Suge Knight as the chairman, and Los Angeles Police Officer Reggie Wright, Jr., as security director, along with “dozens of other LA police officers” moonlighting under Wright.[10]
One of those officers working under Wright was Kevin Hackie, who later said that the FBI was also regularly paying him. [11]
Hackie reportedly turned on the FBI and told Tupac to avoid Las Vegas the night of his shooting there. Death Row subsequently fired Hackie, and he said the FBI set him up on false charges that had him imprisoned for a number of months.[12]
Reggie Wright, Sr., worked as head of the gang division for the Los Angeles area’s Compton Police Department, one of the first locations where the rival Bloods and Crips gangs called a truce, vowing to fight racism.[13]
As the gang truce movement spread nationwide, many of these gang members also gave up drug dealing and started legitimate businesses, taking billions of dollars of profits from the CIA drug traffickers and money launderers.[14]
Davis Arrest Part of Kading’s Unsubstantiated Conclusion of East vs. West Rap Murder
Greg Kading stated that he made “Keefe D” an offer: that the drug-dealing charge pending against him, “and the probable life sentence that came with it,” would be dropped if he gave a confession regarding Tupac’s murder.[15]
Davis stated that it was a coincidence that his nephew, Orlando Anderson, had a scuffle with Tupac and Suge Knight in the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas just after a Mike Tyson fight that evening, but that he and Anderson used that opportunity to murder Tupac just two hours after the scuffle.[16]
Davis further said that rap producer Sean P-Diddy Combs offered a million dollars for Davis and some Crips gang members to kill Suge Knight and Tupac. Many media outlets report that no evidence supports this.[17]
Davis reportedly said he was in the car when he gave a gun to his nephew Orlando Anderson, who fired 13 shots at Tupac, which would prove fatal to him six days later, at the age of 25.[18]
That is quite the coincidence that young Anderson gets Mike Tyson fight tickets in Vegas, gets in a scuffle on a security camera in front of guards, showing probable cause when he purportedly ends up trying to kill Tupac and Knight, but miraculously misses the 300+ pound Suge Knight in the path of the bullets.[19]
Kading said this in his book Murder Rap and to civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who reported that Kading’s information lacked supporting evidence and was unreliable.[20]
A gunman murdered Anderson in 1998, and Russell Poole found evidence supporting Kevin Hackie’s assertion that Death Row security director Reggie Wright, Jr., carried out that murder as Wright owned the same champagne-colored Chevy Blazer observed at the scene of that murder.[21]
Detective Poole had also found much evidence that his fellow police officers in Death Row Records were trafficking drugs and guns.[22]
Suge Knight and others in Death Row further tried to re-start the Bloods versus Crips gang war in Los Angeles at various times, including doing so successfully after Tupac’s shooting, until activists quelled the murderous conflict again by countering Knight’s assertions that the Crips killed Tupac.[23]
Did LAPD Murder an Ex-LA Police Detective Who Concluded They Killed Tupac?
In 1997, Los Angeles Police Department Detective Russell Poole asked to be assigned to top rapper Biggie Smalls’ murder investigation.[24]
Mainstream media had suggested that Biggie Smalls, Tupac’s former friend, and Biggie’s producer Sean “Puff Daddy” (also “Puffy” and “P-Diddy”) Combs had been in a murderous rap rivalry with Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight.[25]
In the 1960s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO documents discussed mainstream media pushing similar “manufactured murderous rivalries” regarding Black Panther leaders, including the “East Coast versus West Coast” conflict between the New York Black Panther-leading Shakurs and National Black Panther leader Huey Newton in Oakland, California.[26]
During the Biggie Smalls murder investigation, LAPD Detective Poole found dozens of his fellow police officers involved with Death Row Records, whom his superiors referred to as “covert agents.”[27]
Poole ended up telling award-winning documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield that he believed these officers killed Biggie Smalls to cover up their murder of Tupac Shakur.[28]
Police superiors threatened Poole for stating these findings and he resigned to get his information to the media. About a decade after Poole started his investigation, powerful forces assigned Detective Greg Kading to “re-investigate” Tupac’s murder.[29]
Poole said that Kading was brought in after leaving “the LAPD in disgrace for his false testimony on a federal murder and racketeering case… Kading never attempted to interview me.”[30]
Russell Poole kept investigating the case and wrote a book with Michael Carlin before he died.[31]
Michael Carlin stated in an affidavit that, when the 58-year-old Poole set up a meeting with the LA County Sheriff to give new evidence, Reggie Wright, Jr., boasted about being present at that meeting, and that Poole was murdered there.[32]
Carlin also stated that several police choked Poole unconscious and murdered him with a defibrillator. Mainstream media restated police reports of Poole having a coincidental heart attack in their office.[33]
Cover-up of Tupac’s Murdered Comrades and Rap Murders En Masse
The arrest of Duane “Keefe D” Davis and his upcoming trial mark the most recent episode in the nearly three decades of cover-up of Tupac Shakur’s murder.
Evidence supports that U.S. intelligence also murdered Tupac’s back-up rapper, Yafeu Fula (Yaki Kadafi), the main witness to Tupac’s murder and the son of Bronx Black Panther leader Sekou Odinga and Panther Yaasmyn Fula.[34]
At the same time as Tupac’s murder, his close comrade and bodyguard Yakhisizwe Tyehimba, son of Tupac’s mentor, Black Panther Watani Tyehimba, turned up dead.[35]
Filmmaker Broomfield had said in his 2002 film Biggie & Tupac that a bipartisan Senate subcommittee was formed in 1993 out of concern over rap’s alleged subversive elements. He also said that the FBI was spying on rappers that year.[36]
Furthermore, in 2004, the Miami Herald revealed that, by the summer of 2001, a New York police unit trained the Miami police, the Los Angeles police and other major cities’ police departments to focus on rappers. Two rappers were murdered in Miami soon after that police training.[37]
Journalist Dasun Allah interviewed New York Police Department rap unit whistleblower Derrick Parker and stated that Parker was trained in the FBI’s COINTELPRO tactics.[38]
Police foul play continued regarding a massive number of other rappers who started turning to activism, including the late Run DMC DJ “Jam Master” Jay Mizell, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, the late Wu-Tang Clan frontman Russell “ODB” Jones, the late Earl “DMX” Simmons, and the late Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom, Dead Prez and The Coup. A number of these rappers were on the New York police rap unit intelligence list.[39]
While there are various lists of murdered rappers, one includes a very conservative listing of 58 rappers murdered starting in December 1993, after the Senate hearing on rappers.[40]
A more expansive list of rappers who were fatally shot includes 211 murdered just between January 2020 and the end of November 2022.[41]
As people around the world paid tribute to Tupac—from a statue in Germany to murals and t-shirt wearing freedom fighters in Africa—it is hoped that Tupac will inspire widespread anti-imperialist struggle despite the continuation of this pro-imperialist cover-up.[42]
