The debates are about to begin in the trial for the murder of rapper Tupac.

The trial of the former gang member accused of orchestrating the murder of Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas, thirty years after the rap legend's unsolved death, will begin on Monday.

Shrouded in mystery, the crime is among the most famous "cold cases" in the United States.

The hearing will probably not reveal who shot Tupac on the night of September 7, 1996, while he was visiting Sin City to attend a Mike Tyson boxing match.

But the prosecution hopes to demonstrate that Duane "Keffe D" Davis, a former member of the South Side Compton Crips, a gang from a sensitive area of Los Angeles, ordered the murder and provided the murder weapon.

Aged 63, he pleads not guilty and faces a life sentence without parole.

After a week spent selecting jurors, the Las Vegas court will get down to business.

With one cardinal question: did the former tough guy with the sharp tongue boast enough to incriminate himself, or is he a fabulist who sought to take advantage of this affair?

- Embarrassing statements -

As early as 2008, Duane Davis admitted to investigators that he was in the white Cadillac from which the shots were fired, that he had obtained a pistol and that the passengers were looking for Tupac, after an affront committed by the rapper a few hours earlier.

But the former drug trafficker spoke out under an agreement that provided partial immunity, preventing his statements from being used against him.

Over the years, the passengers of the infamous Cadillac – never recovered, just like the murder weapon – died. Duane Davis then began to speak to the media about his precise role.

In 2019, he published a memoir in which he recounts that he was in the passenger seat of the vehicle and passed the gun to the passengers in the back seat, without revealing the identity of the shooter.

A book that became the confession too far, which led to his arrest in September 2023.

In their opening statements, the prosecutors will likely argue that the accused is the best witness in this case, and that his embarrassing statements deserve to send him behind bars.

On the other side, the defense will try to portray him as a harmless con man who allowed the co-author of his memoirs to embellish his life for commercial reasons, and who was in Los Angeles on the night of the crime.

"I am innocent. I have never killed anyone," Duane Davis insisted in March 2025, in an interview with ABC News from his prison cell. "They have no evidence against me. They can't even put me in Las Vegas."

- Fierce rivalries -

The next three weeks of hearings will also plunge the jurors back into the fierce rivalries between the rap scenes of the West and East coasts of the United States.

With his hits "California Love" and "All Eyez on Me", recited over melodies blending groove sounds and heavy bass, "2Pac" embodied the slightly poetic bad boy of the "West Coast".

Convicted of sexual assault, he was released from prison by Marion "Suge" Knight, a Los Angeles rap capo, who paid his bail and signed him to his label Death Row Records.

This record company was the sworn enemy of the New York label Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean "P. Diddy" Combs, and where the rapper "The Notorious BIG" worked - killed six months after the death of Tupac Shakur.

According to the prosecution, Death Row Records was protected by Mob Piru, a Los Angeles gang of which Suge was a member; while Bad Boy Records hired the rival South Side Compton Crips organization, to which Duane Davis belonged, to look after its rappers when they traveled to the West Coast.

These tensions turned into a tragedy after Mike Tyson's fight in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand casino.

Suge and Tupac assaulted Duane Davis' nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, because he had previously ripped a medallion off the neck of one of the Death Row employees.

According to the prosecution, Duane Davis then organized himself to avenge the affront to the Crips.