A FORMER SOUTHERN California street gang leader pleaded not guilty today to orchestrating a drive-by shooting that killed Tupac Shakur in 1996 in Las Vegas.

Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis, the only person still alive who was in the vehicle from which shots were fired and the only person ever charged with a crime in the case, stood in shackles before Clark County District Judge Tierra Jones.

Special public defenders Robert Arroyo and Charles Cano represented Davis in court.

Davis lost his bid to hire defence attorney, Ross Goodman, who spoke on Davis’ behalf two weeks ago, saying prosecutors lack witnesses and key evidence, including a gun or vehicle, for the killing committed 27 years ago.

Davis, 60, is originally from Compton, California. He was arrested on 29 September outside a home in suburban Henderson, where Las Vegas police served a search warrant on 17 July, drawing renewed attention to one of hip-hop music’s most enduring mysteries.

Davis remains jailed without bail, did not testify before the grand jury that indicted him, and declined from jail to speak with The Associated Press.

The indictment alleges Davis obtained and provided a gun to someone in the back seat of a Cadillac before the car-to-car gunfire that mortally wounded Shakur and wounded rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection just off the Las Vegas Strip.

Shakur died a week later. He was 25 years old.

Knight, now 58, is in prison in California, serving a 28-year sentence for the death of a Compton businessman in 2015.

He has not responded to messages through his attorneys seeking comment about Davis’ arrest.

Prosecutors allege that Shakur’s killing in Las Vegas came out of competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre dubbed “gangsta rap”.

The grand jury was told the 7 September, 1996 shooting in Las Vegas was retaliation for a brawl hours earlier at a Las Vegas Strip casino involving Shakur and Davis’s nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson.

Prosecutors told a grand jury that Davis implicated himself in the killing in multiple interviews and a 2019 tell-all memoir that described his life leading a Crips sect in Compton.

Davis has said he obtained a .40-calibre handgun and handed it to Anderson, a member of Davis’ gang, in the back seat of a Cadillac, though he did not identify Anderson as the shooter.

Anderson, then 22, denied involvement in Shakur’s killing and died two years later in a shooting in his hometown of Compton.

The other back seat passenger and the driver of the Cadillac are also dead.

In his book, Davis wrote that he told authorities in 2010 what he knew of the killings of Shakur and gang rival, Notorious BIG, whose legal name was Christopher Wallace, to protect himself and 48 of his Southside Compton Crips gang associates from prosecution and the possibility of life sentences in prison.

Wallace, also known as Biggie Smalls, was shot and killed in Los Angeles in March 1997, six months after Shakur’s death. He was 24.

Shakur is largely considered one of the most influential and versatile rappers of all time.

He had five No. 1 albums, was nominated for six Grammy Awards, was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, and received a posthumous star this year on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

He is the subject of a current Los Angeles museum exhibit: Tupac Shakur. Wake Me When I’m Free.