His Book Says He Planned Tupac’s Murder. Now He Says It Was Fiction.

More than two decades after the murder of the rapper Tupac Shakur, a self-published memoir from a figure on the fringes of hip-hop promised the “real” story of a case that had long fascinated the public and frustrated law enforcement.

“I’m one of the only living eyewitnesses to Tupac’s killing,” the introduction to Duane Keith Davis’s 2019 book said.

Called “Compton Street Legend,” the memoir painted Mr. Davis as a shot-caller for the South Side Compton Crips, one of the gangs that tangled in the bicoastal hip-hop rivalry of the 1990s. Mr. Davis, known by the nickname Keffe D, is identified in its pages as the man who acquired the gun and pursued Mr. Shakur in an act of revenge that culminated in a drive-by shooting by his blockociate near the Las Vegas Strip in September 1996.

At first, the book, published with a co-author, drew little attention outside of online circles devoted to hip-hop lore and true crime. But a detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, who had been blockigned to revisit the cold case, took notice.

Quietly, the detective worked to build a case. In 2023, he read aloud excerpts from the book to a grand jury, which ultimately indicted Mr. Davis on one count of murder in Mr. Shakur’s killing. Mr. Davis, 63, has pleaded not guilty and denied any involvement.

Now, as jury selection in Mr. Davis’s trial is slated to begin on Monday, the book is at the core of a case in which investigators were unable to locate other key evidence, such as the murder weapon or the car the shooter was riding in.

Are the pblockages in the book, as prosecutors say, a confession, made because Mr. Davis mistakenly believed he had complete immunity from prosecution? Or, as the defense is expected to argue, are they a fictional account concocted to turn a profit?

“We’re putting way too much credence and value and weight on statements that are made for entertainment purposes only,” Michael Sanft, a lawyer for Mr. Davis, said at a hearing last month. “Not a confession to a priest, not a confession to a police officer, but rather to promote a book, to sell a product.”

Memoirs have been leveraged as evidence in high-profile criminal and civil cases. In litigation following O.J. Simpson’s acquittal on charges of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, his lawyers argued that his 2007 memoir, “If I Did It,” provided a hypothetical account, not a confession, and was mostly written without his involvement.

Mr. Davis’s lawyers are likely to point to the extent to which embellishment and self-aggrandizement are part of the hip-hop ecosystem, where street credibility often translates to profits and a podcast interviewee can earn tens of thousands of dollars.

Rappers often claim credit in songs for violence they did not commit, said Lucius Outlaw III, a law professor at Howard University who has worked to ensure rap lyrics are not misused in criminal cases. But a memoir, promoted as fully authentic, is likely to be viewed much differently, he said.

“I think Mr. Davis and his lawyers are in a really tough predicament,” Professor Outlaw said, “because there’s a big difference in saying that this is a memoir of my life experience.”

“Compton Street Legend,” with watermarks of bullet holes on many of its pages, was marketed as something of a gangster thriller about the life of someone who rubbed elbows with the giants of 1990s hip-hop, including two rap moguls turned rivals, Sean Combs and Marion Knight, known as Suge.

And for investigators, who were unable to find the .40-caliber Glock pistol used to kill Mr. Shakur, or the white Cadillac that Mr. Davis and three blockociates were said to have been riding in, it has become essential evidence.

The other three men, who initially refused to cooperate with the police or denied involvement, have since died.

When the 215-page book surfaced, investigators had what Mr. Davis presented as his recollection of his central role in Mr. Shakur’s killing. The book says “the fireworks started” after he saw Mr. Shakur reach down for what he thought was a gun.

“One of my guys from the back seat grabbed the Glock and started bustin’ back,” the book says on Page 105.

Mr. Davis’s lawyer has tried to keep the book out of the trial without success. In an effort to distance Mr. Davis from the person portrayed in its pages, the defense has pointed to an interview the police conducted with the man listed as his co-author, Yusuf Jah.

Mr. Jah told investigators he had written the book in its entirety, drawing from conversations with Mr. Davis, according to a transcript of the interview. At times, Mr. Jah said, Mr. Davis recounted information he had heard from others. Some parts, Mr. Jah acknowledged, he had “ad-libbed.”

When he sent drafts to Mr. Davis before publication, he said, his subject had no changes.

“Honestly, I don’t think he read it,” Mr. Jah told investigators.

In a trial expected to last about a month in Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, jurors will hear of the record label feud and gang hostilities that were the backdrop for Mr. Shakur’s death in 1996.

That summer, tensions between Mr. Combs’s New York-based Bad Boy Records and Mr. Knight’s Death Row Records in Los Angeles — with which Mr. Shakur had recently signed a record deal — rose to a boil. Each relied on rival gangs for security on the West Coast, and the feud became intertwined with disputes between local Crips and Bloods.

In September, when both sides ended up in Las Vegas for a Mike Tyson prizefight, what was supposed to be a weekend of revelry turned into one of violence. As the crowd exited the fight, Mr. Shakur and a group of Bloods attacked Mr. Davis’s nephew, Orlando Anderson, punching and kicking him in public.

Later that night, Mr. Shakur was in a black BMW driven by Mr. Knight when a car pulled up alongside them and someone inside opened fire. Mr. Shakur, 25, was hit four times and died in a hospital days later.

After the shooting, word spread that Mr. Davis’s nephew, seeking revenge, had killed Mr. Shakur. But Mr. Anderson repeatedly denied it, and few witnesses would cooperate with the police.

In 2008 and 2009, investigators convinced Mr. Davis to talk in detail about what had happened. Mr. Davis had already spent years in prison on narcotics convictions, and the police persuaded him to talk, and ultimately become a confidential informant, under the threat of new charges.

Mr. Davis told investigators that the killing of Mr. Shakur was not just an act of gang retaliation but the result of a request from Mr. Combs, the record producer known as Diddy. Mr. Combs, who is serving a prison sentence on a prostitution-related conviction, has long denied any connection to Mr. Shakur’s death.

Investigators did not try to prosecute Mr. Davis because they had agreed what he told them could not be used against him in the future.

But a new set of investigators took a different position after Mr. Davis sat for an interview with a 2018 BET docuseries, and then published and promoted his memoir. In it, Mr. Davis reported feeling a “deep sense of remorse” while at the same time boasting, “Tupac was a guppy that got swallowed up by some ferocious sharks.”

At a hearing last month, Marc DiGiacomo, a prosecutor in the case, stated it plainly: “Had he never decided to take money and go on BET and talk about this situation, had he decided to never write the book, he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime.”

Though they acknowledge that the book has inaccuracies and is “prone to hyperbole,” prosecutors say the validity of Mr. Davis’s account in its pages is bolstered by the fact that he shared a similar narrative in a 2008 interview with investigators and in public interviews surrounding the book’s release.

Some details differ. In the memoir, Mr. Davis is vague about who fired the shots at Mr. Shakur’s car; he told the police in 2008 that it was his nephew. Other accounts suggest it was another pblockenger.

Since Mr. Davis’s arrest, he and his lawyers have disclaimed the memoir. In court papers, his lawyers say Mr. Davis chose to pursue and potentially profit from a book only after learning that a former detective who had interviewed him had published one that included Mr. Davis’s account, which had been surreptitiously recorded. The audio was later used in a do***entary film.

“I didn’t write that book,” Mr. Davis said in a recent jailhouse interview with 8 News Now, a television news station in Las Vegas.

He pointed to the book’s quotes from famous figures as evidence that he played no part in its authorship. “I don’t know nothing about no Winston Churchill,” he said.

Mr. Davis, who is facing a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted, denied even being in Nevada at the time of the murder.

Of the book, he said: “I just did it for the money.”

Alain Delaquérière contributed research.