Duane “Keffe D” Davis once ran with the South Side Compton Crips, but his reign as a gang leader officially ended with a guilty verdict in a Las Vegas courtroom on August 31, 2026.
The charge: orchestrating the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur. Now, at 63, he’s staring down a life sentence.
Davis’s beginnings, though, were a world away from the violent notoriety that would define him.
Born in Watts to a Texas homemaker and a Virginia-born U.S. Marine, his childhood carried the weight of dual influences Southern roots and military discipline.
But when he was just 15, his mother succumbed to colon cancer, a loss that cracked something open in him and, in many ways, set the course for everything that followed.
