Reggie Wright Jr.

On the night of September 7, 1996, Reggie Wright Jr. kept reaching for his cell phone. He called his father, a lieutenant with the Compton police, and warned him: there had been trouble in Las Vegas with the Southside Compton Crips, and it was going to mean trouble in Compton. That is how he described it under oath thirty years later. Shortly before, Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight had been shot at a traffic light.

Wright was the man responsible for security at Death Row. Anyone who wants to understand why Tupac was so poorly protected that night cannot get around him.

A police officer as head of security

Wright’s company Wright Way supplied Death Row’s bodyguards; by his account the label made up about 95 percent of his business, and he was on the company’s payroll himself. In Las Vegas on September 7, 1996, he was not at Tupac’s side. Two men were assigned to Tupac: Frank Alexander and Kevin Hackie. According to Wright, Hackie did not show up because he was held up by an arrest and a hospital stay. So Alexander accompanied Tupac alone.

Wright’s men carried no guns that evening. They had not been able to get permits in Nevada, Wright told The Guardian in 2024, as XXL reported. Death Row had felt too safe in Las Vegas. His biggest regret, he said, was that as the man in charge he had not saved Tupac’s life. The security staff at Knight’s Club 662, on the other hand, were armed, as their chief at the time testified in 2026.

A suspicion that never became a charge

In 2007 Frank Alexander and the filmmaker Richard Bond released the film Tupac Assassination. Its theory: security around Tupac had been deliberately weakened that night, and the trail led to Wright. The film presented no evidence for this. Wright sharply rejected the accusations and accused Alexander of failing to protect Tupac properly himself and of exploiting his death. Wright was never charged in the Shakur case.

In 2014 Wright was on the other side. Together with Lloyd Lake, a former associate of Knight’s, he crowdfunded a documentary that was to accuse authorities of a cover-up in the Tupac and Biggie cases (news item).

Witness before the grand jury and in the courtroom

When Las Vegas police reopened the case in 2023, Wright testified before the grand jury. He described an encounter after the Soul Train Music Awards in March 1996 in Los Angeles: Biggie’s security that night had included members of the Southside Compton Crips, among them Duane Davis. A gun was drawn, but no shots were fired. The page The Notorious B.I.G. tells the scene.

On August 18, 2026, the prosecution called him to the stand at the Davis trial. He confirmed that Alexander did not call him after the fight with Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand. He himself had not been in the arena for the fight but in the MGM parking lot and afterwards at Club 662. After Tupac’s death he personally received the ashes and had an employee deliver them to the family (Funeral, ashes and grave). Asked by Chief Deputy District Attorney Binu Palal whether he had anything to do with the murder, he answered: “Absolutely not.” Had he known about an attack, he would have put an “army” around Tupac.

The defense used him anyway. On cross-examination, attorney Michael Sanft put it to him that he had not been there in Knight’s most important hour; Wright admitted it. In closing arguments Sanft again pointed to him. The jury did not follow: on August 31, 2026, it found Davis guilty, and on October 13, 2026, the court sentenced him to 40 years to life. Davis denies the crime, the defense has announced an appeal, and the verdict is not final. The course of the trial is described in The trial of Duane Davis 2026.

In thirty years Wright has played every role this case had to offer: the man in charge, the accused in a film, a critic of the authorities, a witness in court. In the end, someone else was charged.