Prosecutors have alleged that the 1996 slaying of rapper Tupac Shakur — the subject of a long-awaited, ongoing trial — was a Las Vegas crime involving gang-connected players from Los Angeles.
But the fatal shooting did not occur in a vacuum.
Multiple former law enforcement officials who worked on Las Vegas gang cases in the 1990s said that era saw a wave of crime locally as Los Angeles gangs expanded into Sin City. Sometimes, as has been alleged in the killing of Shakur, the crimes coincided with boxing matches and were difficult to solve, with reluctant witnesses and perpetrators who disappeared back to California, the former officials said.
“We had dozens of shootings, homicides, back and forth, drive-by shootings,” said U.S. Marshal Gary Schofield, a retired Metropolitan Police Department deputy chief who served as a sergeant in the department’s gang unit. “Anything that was happening in Los Angeles was happening in Las Vegas.”
Violence in Compton constantly spilled over into Las Vegas with visiting Bloods and Crips, former Mob Piru gang member James McDonald, a witness at the trial, said in an interview.
Las Vegas “was totally different from Compton,” McDonald said. “And Vegas was a getaway from everything that was going on in Compton.”
Allegations of gang involvement
Duane Davis, 63, was indicted in 2023 on a count of murder with a deadly weapon with an intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang.
He is the only person ever prosecuted in connection with the slaying of Shakur, who died days after the drive-by shooting near the Strip.
Prosecutors see the killing as the culmination of a clash involving rival gangs and record companies.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal told jurors Monday that Davis was a leader in the South Side Compton Crips in the 1990s. At that time, Compton was just 10 square miles, but was populated by more than 30 gangs, he said.
The South Side Crips were aligned with Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Bad Boy Records label, while the Bloods-associated Mob Piru gang had ties to Death Row Records, a label led by Marion “Suge” Knight that represented Shakur.
“Tupac Shakur was not a gangster, he was a hip hop artist associated with the Mob Piru,” Palal said.
During the summer of 1996, there was a fight between Mob Piru and Crips members at a mall in California involving Davis’ nephew Orlando Anderson and a Mob Piru member named Trevon Lane, according to Palal.
The two men encountered each other that September following a fight between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand, authorities have said. Shakur and his entourage attacked Anderson and Davis, a “shot-caller,” came up with a plan to exact revenge, prosecutors allege.
McDonald told the jury that he thinks Shakur inherited a larger dispute between Knight and “Puff,” an apparent reference to Combs.
“Some of us fell victim to it because we allowed ourselves to be part of the issue, like I said, and that was a situation between record companies, not by gangs,” he testified.
Whether record companies or gangs were more at fault, Palal said gang warfare followed those involved in the shooting back to Compton.
People were afraid to come forward to police, but Piru and Crips members retaliated against each other, he said.
Within 10 days, he said three people were killed and others shot. None of those cases were prosecuted, he told jurors, because the “combination of gangs and guns is scary.”
Gang cases in Las Vegas
Frank Coumou, a former Clark County prosecutor who handled gang cases in the late 1990s, knew all too well how hard it was to pursue gang cases.
Witnesses were reluctant and victims imperfect.
“Today’s victim was tomorrow’s defendant sometimes and so you were criss-crossing and having to worry about immunity deals and such, and then you always worried about the violence, if it was spilling over and causing injury to innocent citizens,” he said.
Back then, he knew little about the killing of Shakur, but suspected it was a retaliatory gang hit, he said.
The reasons for retaliation could seem unreasonable. He recalled a shooting in which a gang member killed another gang member who bumped his shoulder.
Coumou thinks the gang activity in Las Vegas largely came from Los Angeles. Schofield described an infiltration of Los Angeles gangs in the 1990s. Kathleen Bliss, a former federal prosecutor, said Los Angeles gangs expanded into Las Vegas, creating groups that controlled territory in the city and North Las Vegas.
But the throughlines were not always straight.
Gangs could be structured loosely and the Bloods and Crips had many different subgroups, said Schofield, who infiltrated a local street gang as an undercover detective.
Back then, gangs were focused on control over drug turf, he said. “It was almost to the point where everybody had a different block that was under control of one set or one gang.”
Former Clark County District Attorney David Roger described that era as “kind of the Wild West.”
“During the ’90s, it was really an infestation of gangs,” he said. “We also had gang members that would drive in from California to commit crimes on the weekends and then take off and head back home.”
Speaking about the possibility of gang involvement in the killing of Shakur, Bliss said, “It wasn’t related to a core tenet or goal or manner or means. That’s my view. I think there was something else going on.”
She then said she was not stating an opinion about whether the shooting was gang-related.
Bliss, who started working at the U.S. attorney’s office in 2000, was also skeptical of the notion that Los Angeles gang members traveled to Las Vegas for weekend gang activity.
“I don’t buy that at all because you had territorial issues that would create problems, even if they were affiliates of the same core Blood or Crip group,” she said.
“The Vegas gangs out here didn’t get along with LA gang members,” McDonald, the former Mob Piru, said in an interview.
Boxing and violent crime
Retired federal prosecutor Tom O’Connell prosecuted multiple 1990s cases in which Los Angeles gang members committed violent crimes in Las Vegas.
Those included the April 1994 takeover-style armed robbery of Harrah’s that netted $97,000 and involved members of both the Crips and Bloods, who according to O’Connell, had essentially brokered a truce to commit crimes in Las Vegas.
That occurred the weekend of a fight between Evander Holyfield and Michael Moorer at Caesars Palace.
The same weekend, gang members were also suspected of robbing the Flamingo for $125,000.
O’Connell has been chronicling that era on his Substack, Cop, Esq. Asked why Las Vegas appealed to gang members, he cited old-time bank robber Willie Sutton’s quote about why he liked robbing banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”
“Not only was the money in these casinos, but the casinos back then had no-shoot policies for their guards,” O’Connell said. “They weren’t even allowed to shoot at these guys, because they were terrified that if one of these minimum wage security guards killed a guest in the casino, the liability would be far more than the proceeds of the robbery.”
The gang scene is different today, Schofield said.
“Nowadays, you don’t see what we saw in the ’90s and into the 2000s,” he said. “There’s very few places that anybody drives to anymore to buy drugs. That’s not the way it’s distributed anymore.”
He also believes gang violence has decreased as a result of efforts by law enforcement and the community.
In 2006, 12-year-old Gregory Adams was fatally shot in the head in the Historic Westside in what Schofield described as a gang-related shooting and a “watershed incident.”
Metro did not believe Gregory was part of a gang, but he was caught in crossfire between gang members, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported at the time.
“I couldn’t understand how that could happen,” Schofield said.
After that, Schofield, then-captain of the Metro area command covering the Westside, worked with ministers and other community members to combat violence and helped to start Safe Village, a community safety program.
“It took 20, 25 years to get things stabilized where the scars and wounds of what occurred with gang violence are slowly being overcome,” he said.
Contact Noble Brigham at nbrigham@reviewjournal.com.
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