Is the Rap War Real? Questions After Biggie's Death

Original: “Is the rap war for real?” · Associated Press, reprinted in the Las Vegas Sun · no byline · March 10, 1997

In the early morning of March 9, 1997, shots were fired at The Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) in Los Angeles. He was sitting in a parked GMC Suburban after a Vibe magazine party following the Soul Train Music Awards when shots were fired from a passing car. He was 24.

The day after, the Associated Press asked the question that consumed the entire scene at the time: Had the feud between the East and West Coast, long dismissed as a publicity stunt, become deadly serious? Two stars were dead, six months apart, both having died in almost the exact same way.

Skepticism Among Investigators, Division in the Industry

Opinions in the report diverged. Sergeant Kevin Manning from Las Vegas saw no indication of a connection. Soul Train creator Don Cornelius demanded that authorities finally take the rivalry seriously. Publicist Phyllis Pollack dismissed that as nonsense: no artist in the West wanted to murder colleagues from the East to sell more records. Jesse Washington, managing editor of Vibe, warned against jumping to conclusions and called the deaths a “sad reflection on the level of violence in our community.”

The 1994 Robbery and Tupac’s Accusations

The piece recalled the backstory: Tupac accused Biggie of being behind the November 1994 attack in New York, in which he was shot and robbed. Biggie denied it. Later, Tupac bragged in a song about having slept with Biggie’s wife, Faith Evans.

No Coastal War: The Motive Lay at the MGM Grand

To this day, the article’s question has not been cleanly answered. Biggie’s murder remains officially unsolved. Tupac’s murder, by contrast, ended up in court: On August 31, 2026, Duane “Keffe D” Davis of the Southside Compton Crips was found guilty in Las Vegas (not final, as of October 2026).

The motive presented by the prosecution was local: the brawl in which Tupac and Suge Knight’s entourage beat up Davis’s nephew Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand hours before the crime. According to the prosecution, Davis handed the gun to a man in the back seat and ordered the shooting. The East-West rivalry thus appears more as an overheated backdrop than the cause.

Note: The archival text spoke of “Sunday morning”; the shots were actually fired around 12:45 a.m. on the night of Sunday, March 9, 1997.