Guilty pleasures
By NewsPress Now
Judge considering
if ex-gang leader
gets house arrest
LAS VEGAS | A Nevada judge said Tuesday she wasn’t immediately convinced of the legality of an effort by a hip-hop music figure to underwrite a $750,000 bond to free a former Los Angeles-area gang leader from jail ahead of his murder trial in the 1996 killing of hip-hop music legend Tupac Shakur in Las Vegas.
Clark County District Court Judge Carli Kierny expressed doubts after hearing arguments about granting Duane “Keffe D” Davis’ release to house arrest with electronic monitoring, but said she would review financial records submitted by his benefactor — Cash Jones, a music record executive who has managed performers such as rappers The Game and Blueface. In recent years, he’s gotten into street fights and made controversial comments about the late Tupac Shakur and Nipsey Hussle.
The judge promised to post a brief description of her decision in the court record. She did not say when.
Davis’ attorney, Carl Arnold, told reporters outside court that he hoped for a decision later Tuesday. Prosecutors Binu Palal and Marc DiGiacomo declined to comment.
Jones, who uses the moniker “Wack 100,” offered sworn testimony by internet video link from an unspecified place in California. Under questioning by Arnold, Jones said he paid 15% of the bail amount, or $112,500, as “a gift” from his business accounts to secure Davis’ release.
“I know him in passing,” Jones said of Davis, a 61-year-old self-described head of a Crips gang sect in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton who has been held at the Clark County Detention Center since his arrest last September. Davis and his attorneys have said he isn’t getting proper medical care in jail following treatment before his arrest for colon cancer.
“I know his son,” Jones said of Davis. “We talked a few times. I know he’s having an issue with his health.”
“He’s always been a monumental person in our community,” Jones added during questioning by Palal. “Especially the urban community.”
Asked by the prosecutor if he had any contract or financial agreement with Davis for a television or movie deal based on Davis’ self-described gang life and role in the killing of Shakur, Jones twice said, “Not as of yet.”
Nevada has a law sometimes called a “slayer statute” that prohibits convicted killers from profiting from their crime. Jailhouse visits and telephone calls are also routinely recorded.
The prosecutor played clips from a VladTV social media interview in which Jones told his interviewer he would bail Davis out of jail “in return for an agreement to do a series on Mr. Davis’ life.” Palal asked Jones to explain.
“That’s what I said to Vlad,” Jones responded, noting that he was paid for the interview to draw viewers. “There’s nothing about Vlad, nothing about YouTube, that says you have to be truthful.”
Palal also played a recording of a jailhouse phone call in which Jones describes to Davis a plan to produce “30 to 40 episodes” of a television show based on his life story.
“We talking business. I’m telling you what my idea is,” Jones says. “You gotta remember bro, this (expletive) can set you up for the rest of your life.”
Palal told the judge that Jones intended to profit from Davis’ story.
“Mr. Davis is getting the benefits from retelling his story in the killing of Mr. Shakur. As a result, Mr. Jones, in order to benefit from that, is paying the bail bond company,” the prosecutor said. “Although it’s convoluted, it’s clear that a fraud is being perpetrated on this court. One way or another … it is an illegal benefit, profiting from this crime.”
The judge ended the 45-minute hearing saying she was “left with more questions than answers.” But she agreed to review Jones’ financial records.
Davis has sought to be released since shortly after his arrest last September made him the only person ever charged with a crime in a killing that for 27 years has drawn intense interest and speculation.
Davis told Kierny in court in February that backers were “hesitant to come in here and help me out on the bail because of the media and the circus that’s going on.”
Prosecutors allege the gunfire that killed Shakur stemmed from competition between East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect and West Coast groups of a Crips sect, including Davis, for dominance in a musical genre known at the time as “gangsta rap.”
Davis has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder. His trial is scheduled Nov. 4. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.
According to police, prosecutors and Davis’ own accounts, he is the only person still alive among four people who were in a white Cadillac from which shots were fired in September 1996, mortally wounding Shakur and grazing rap mogul Marion “Suge” Knight at an intersection just off the Las Vegas Strip. Knight, now 59, is serving 28 years in a California prison for using a vehicle to kill a Los Angeles-area man in 2015.
Davis has publicly described himself as the orchestrator of the shooting, but not the gunman. A renewed push by Las Vegas police to solve the case led to a search warrant and raid last July at his home in Henderson.
Prosecutors say they have strong evidence to convict Davis of murder based his own accounts during multiple police and media interviews since 2008 — and in a 2019 memoir of his life leading a Compton street gang.
In his book, Davis wrote he was promised immunity to tell authorities in Los Angeles what he knew about the fatal shootings of Shakur and rival rapper Christopher Wallace six months later in Los Angeles. Wallace was known as The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls.
Arnold maintains that Davis told stories so he could make money and that police and prosecutors in Nevada lack key evidence including the gun, the Cadillac and proof that Davis was in Las Vegas at the time of the shooting.
Hollywood crews, studios reach tentative contract deal
The union that represents most behind-the-scenes film and television crews has reached a tentative deal with studios for about 50,000 of its members, making another major, production-stopping strike unlikely after a year of labor turmoil in Hollywood.
The two sides announced the three-year deal in a joint statement Tuesday night.
The union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said in an email to members, who still must vote to approve the deal, that the agreement includes the pay hikes and artificial intelligence protections they had been vying for.
The contract, known as the Basic Agreement, affects about 50,000 crew members who belong to 13 different West Coast-based union locals, including art directors, set painters, editors, camera technicians, costume designers, hair stylists and make-up artists.
A separate agreement that affects about 20,000 crew members across the country is still under negotiation.
Last year’s grueling writers’ and actors’ strikes, and 2021 IATSE talks that went well past the contract’s expiration and nearly spilled into a strike, had raised fears that 2024 would bring more work stoppages in an industry that still hasn’t gotten entirely back to work after being shut down for much of 2023.
Actors including Mark Ruffalo and Kerry Washington sent a letter to the AMPTP last week urging a fair contract for crews.
Several individual branches had already reached separate agreements on the issues unique to them. The Basic Agreement affects crew members across different jobs.
IATSE reached Tuesday night’s deal with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents studios, streaming services and production companies including Disney, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon Prime. It’s the same alliance that struggled to reach a deal with writers and actors during prolonged strikes last year. But the tentative Basic Agreement agreement comes nearly a month before the previous contract expired.
The letter to IATSE members said more details on the tentative deal will be released later in the week, but it “includes new protections around Artificial Intelligence, including language that ensures no employee is required to provide AI prompts in any manner that would result in the displacement of any covered employee.”
It also includes scale rate increases of 7%, 4%, and 3.5% over the three-year term, triple time for workers who surpass 15 hours in a day, and payments from studios to help make up for a shortfall in the union’s health insurance budget, the letter said.
King Charles III welcomes the visiting Japanese emperor and empress
LONDON | King Charles III welcomed the Japanese emperor and empress for a state visit that began on Tuesday, offering the best in pomp and circumstance as the U.K. seeks to bolster its role as the most influential European nation in the Indo-Pacific region.
Emperor Naruhito and Empress of Masako are to attend a banquet hosted by the king, lay a wreath at Westminster Abbey and tour one of Britain’s premier biomedical research institutes. But the emperor began this week’s trip by visiting a site that has special meaning: The Thames Barrier.
The retractable flood control gates on the River Thames seemed a natural destination for a royal long interested in the waterway that runs through the heart of London. Naruhito studied 18th-century commerce on the river as a graduate student at the University of Oxford some 40 years ago.
He chronicled the interest in his memoir “The Thames and I,” together with his fondness for Britain and its people. The future emperor got a chance to experience life outside the palace walls, including doing his own ironing, going to the bank and taking part in pub crawls.
Tuesday’s ceremonial welcome seemed warm. Charles and Naruhito, who have known each other for years, settled into the back of a carriage and chatted like old chums.
Masako wore a mask in her carriage because of a horse hair allergy.
Both countries look to each other as a source of stability and mutual reassurance at a time of potentially destabilizing global political change.
“We’ve had a long history of engagement,’’ said John Nilsson-Wright, the head of the Japan and Koreas program at the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. “But … this current visit (is) a reflection of both the personal ties of affection between the two royal families (and) perhaps most importantly of all, the geopolitical significance of the relationship.”
Soprano Anna Netrebko announces separation from tenor Yusif Eyvazov
Soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Yusif Eyvazov have separated.
The couple had been together since 2014, when they appeared together in Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera. They married in 2015.
“After 10 happy years together, we have made the difficult but amicable decision to separate,” Netrebko and Eyvazov said in a statement issued Wednesday by her London-based manager. “We will remain wonderful friends, united in our love for Tiago, and look forward to our announced and future stage collaborations.”
Netrebko, 52, has a 15-year-old son, Tiago, from her relationship with bass-baritone Erwin Schrott, her partner from 2007-2013.
Netrebko was dropped by New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2022 because the company said she did not repudiate Russian President Vladimir Putin following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She has sued the Met and general manager Peter Gelb, alleging defamation and breach of contract.
—From AP reports
