LAS VEGAS - Jury selection is due to begin on Aug 10 in the murder trial of a former street gang leader accused of masterminding the drive-by shooting death of hip-hop star Tupac Shakur three decades ago in Las Vegas, a long-unsolved crime that became a seminal moment in rap music history.

Duane “Keffe D” Davis, 63, is charged in Clark County, Nevada, with a single count of murder by use of a deadly weapon. He has pleaded not guilty. Davis is accused of leading a group of men to kill Shakur, 25, one of rap’s most commercially successful and influential artists, in a 1996 drive-by shooting near the Las Vegas Strip.

The killing heightened the image of violence permeating hip-hop culture and its lyrics during “gangsta” rap’s golden age, stoking the infamous East Coast-West Coast rap feud of that era.

Police said after Davis’ 2023 arrest that he was a long-time suspect in the killing, but that investigators lacked sufficient admissible evidence to charge him until he began implicating himself in a series of public statements.

The trial before Judge Carli Kierny is expected to run for up to six weeks in a downtown Las Vegas courthouse. It may feature testimony from Death Row Records co-founder Marion “Suge” Knight, a former rap mogul who was with Shakur the night he was slain and is now serving a 28-year prison sentence on an unrelated voluntary manslaughter conviction.

The ‘shot caller’

The authorities have described Davis as the “shot caller” of a hurried plot to avenge the beating of his nephew by Shakur and members of his entourage inside the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas the night of Sept 7, 1996.

The violence at the casino allegedly stemmed from hostility between two Los Angeles-area street gangs – the South Side Compton Crips, of which Davis was the self-desc...