Biggie's Case — What the LAPD Did to the Investigation

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:11)

So Tupac Shakur, we finally have a conviction there, 30 years later, of the man who didn't even pull the trigger, but was allegedly the baller shot caller of the case, Keffe D. What about Biggie? What about the actual investigation that led us to Keffe D? Were detectives investigating the wrong murder? Because when you look back on this, you're like, oh, wow, how did we get here?

Let's take a look at this. This is a fair question. A lot of people are asking this question right now of what happened with that murder investigation. Well, let's go back, way back. Let's go to 2008

LAPD Task Force Detectives Darren Dupree and Greg Kating showed up at Duane KeffeD Davis' home in Corona, California. They weren't there about Tupac. They were investigating the murder of Christopher Wallace, a notorious BAG who was 24 when he was shot and killed in Los Angeles 11 years earlier. Davis was a person of interest because he drove a Chevy Impala that matched the description of the shooter's car and because he'd been at the party at the Peterson Automotive Museum that Wallace was leaving when he was killed. The detectives had more than questions. They told Davis they had evidence linking him to cocaine and PCP trafficking. And with his criminal history, he was looking at a potential life sentence. So there's some pressure coming on.

According to Detective Dupree's testimony at the KeffeD trial, Davis denied having anything to do with Biggie's murder. Then he said something nobody in the room expected. We did the other one. What? What? Tupac. Oh.

That statement eventually put Davis in a Las Vegas courtroom. And on August 31st of 2026, a jury convicted him of first degree murder in Tupac Shakur's shooting in under three hours. The task force that produced the confession, the one built specifically to solve Biggie's murder, never produced anything for Biggie. 29 years after Christopher Wallace was shot four times while sitting in an SUV at a red light on Wilshire Boulevard, there are no charges, no arrests and no suspects. The LAPD won't confirm whether anyone is even still actually investigating.

The case that solved Tupac's murder can't solve itself. And the reason isn't a lack of evidence, it's a pattern, a decades long pattern of the institution responsible for solving this murder, shutting down the people who get close. Russell Poole was the first LAPD detective assigned to Wallace's murder in 1997 Within a month, his investigation led him to two of the department's own officers. David Mack and Rafael Perez both had ties to Death Row Records, the label run by Marion SugeKnight. Mack was later convicted of bank robbery. Perez went to prison for stealing cocaine from police evidence lockers. Both were central figures in the Rappart Corruption scandal, one of the most widespread cases of police corruption in LAPD history. Poole's theory was that Knight used Mack's and an associate named Amir Muhammad to carry out the hit on Biggie, retaliation for Tupac's murder six months earlier. That theory pointed directly at the department's own officers, LAPD Chief Bernard Perks ordered Poole to stop investigating David Mack. Poole resigned from the department in 1999 He spent the next 16 years as a private investigator, pushing his theory in public while the case sat frozen behind him. In August 2015, Poole was meeting with Los Angeles County Sheriff's Homicide Investigators about a cold case when he suffered a heart attack. He died at the hospital. The man who dedicated his career to solving Biggie's murder never saw an arrest. With the Poole investigation, exposed something the LAPD couldn't bury. In 2002, Wallace's mother, Voletta, filed a $400 million wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles. The suit alleged that LAPD officers were involved in her son's murder and that the department covered it up. In 2005, three days into the civil trial, federal judge Florence Marie Cooper declared a mistrial. An anonymous tip revealed that LAPD detective Stephen Katz had hidden a stack of documents in his desk drawer. Those documents contained informant statements linking Perez and Mack.

The evidence the Wallace family needed to prove a cover up had been sitting inside the police department's own building withheld from the court. Judge Cooper ordered the city to pay Wallace family $1.1 million in sanctions. The family refiled the lawsuit in 2006

That same year, under pressure from the lawsuit, LAPD Chief William Bratton created a new task force. It was a joint operation. LAPD, DEA and FBI led by Detective Greg Kating. The mandate followed the evidence wherever it goes, even if it points back at the department. Kating's team got further than anyone before them. They built a federal drug case against KeffeD to use his leverage. They targeted Davis specifically because of its impala and the fact that he had been at the Peterson Party the night Biggie died. When they sat down with Davis on December 18th of 2008 for a proffersession, an interview where his statements allegedly couldn't be used against him, they expected to hear about Biggie. Instead, Davis confessed to Tupac's murder.