Six months after the murder of Tupac Shakur – the most prominent casualty of the boiling hip-hop feud between coasts – his biggest rival, Christopher Wallace, looked tired of it all.
“I’m just getting over – you know what I’m saying – this whole situation with this East Coast-West Coast thing, you know?” Wallace – better known as Biggie Smalls and The Notorious B.I.G. – told San Francisco radio station KYLD in March 1997. “That’s just game over, you know what I’m saying? I’m trying to, like, basically squash it.”
Four days later, Wallace was dead, too. Another drive-by shooting, and another tally in the body count blamed on a rap rivalry that had helped make them both rich.
Although the high-profile murder trial of Duane “Keffe D” Davis – which will culminate with closing arguments Monday after less than two weeks of testimony – is focused on the allegation he orchestrated the killing of Shakur, the name Biggie Smalls keeps coming up.
Within the first hour of opening statements, he was mentioned by prosecutors. Two of the witnesses who testified were originally assigned to investigate Wallace’s death – not Shakur’s. And Davis wrote in his 2019 memoir that he was nearby when both of the men were killed.
