The entrepreneur already has a longstanding partnership with vodka brand Ciroc, and he is now hoping to team with a “true tequila artiste” to extend his interests.
Kading claims that a Southside Crip named Duane “Keffe D” Keith Davis, on the morning of Dec. 18, 2008, told police he was offered $1 million by then Bad Boy CEO Sean “Diddy” Combs to kill Death Row rapper Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight, the label’s former CEO.
According to Kading, Keffe D tells his interrogators in plain language that Combs — then known as Puff Daddy, the ringmaster of Death Row Records’ bitter cross-country rival — commissioned Shakur’s murder in Vegas in September 1996. (Knight would survive that night’s shooting with a bullet wound to the head.)
Six months later, Bad Boy Entertainment’s star Biggie was shot to death in L.A. In the decade and a half since the two most famous homicides in hip-hop history, police have made no arrests.
Kading says his bosses pulled him off the double investigation right when he was poised to drive it home, then, they shut it down completely. An LAPD spokesman insists in an email to LA Weekly that the case is still “active/ongoing” but that no further information is available. If true, this means the LAPD has only in the past couple of months revived the probe.
Kading made copies of nearly every investigative report and taped confession before he left LAPD. His explosive book details the behind-the-scenes failure by LAPD to bring Tupac and Biggie’s killers to justice.
In a taped confession fully reviewed by L.A. Weekly, Keffe D says, “[Combs] took me downstairs and he’s like, ‘Man, I want to get rid of them dudes.’ … I was like, ‘We’ll wipe their ass out, quick. It’s nothing.’ … We wanted a million.” In another stunning confession, detailed in LAPD documents reviewed by the Weekly, the mother of one of Knight’s children, identified in Kading’s book as “Theresa Swann,” breaks down in tears, stating that the former Death Row boss gave her the money to pay Wardell “Poochie” Fouse — Knight’s close associate and a fellow member of the Mob Piru Bloods — to kill Biggie.
Keffe D is up against a wall at the time he fingers Combs for Shakur’s murder. The federal and local agents gathered around him at the conference table, including Kading, have spent the last year cornering him as the kingpin of a nationwide PCP ring, and Keffe D is looking at 25 years to life if he doesn’t reveal his secrets.
Sean Combs told the Weekly via email: “This story is pure fiction and completely ridiculous.” Suge Knight could not be reached.
Greg Kading Discusses His Book About the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls from Village Voice Media on Vimeo.