Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (10 page)

Which, in itself, led to the inevitable question.

“Brian,” I asked straight up when Tyndall called me on May 1, 2006, with his offer to join the team, “are we supposed to solve this case or are we supposed to protect the department?”

“Greg,” he replied, “we’re going to go wherever this takes us. You have my word on it.”

That meant a lot. A free hand to do the job was my one non-negotiable stipulation, even if it meant exposing an LAPD conspiracy or cover-up. That was especially true since, up to that point, I had been on the outside of the case. Like a lot of people, I was inclined to believe at least some of Poole’s conjectures. The inescapable conclusion was that among my fellow officers were the very suspects we would be searching out.

I also knew that Tyndall wouldn’t be telling me just what I wanted to hear. He was too good a cop, and we’d known each other for too long, for evasion to be a factor. I’d first met Brian Tyndall back in 1994 when he was part of an Officer Involved Shooting Squad along with Bill Holcomb, another initial member of the evolving Biggie Smalls task force. I came before them after an incident when, observing a street fight on patrol, I had pursued one of the combatants into a nearby house. When he pulled a gun I shot him with what was my own version of a “magic bullet.” Purely as a result of the angle of the trajectory, one slug made a grand total of five holes and deprived him of his testicles in the process.

Tyndall and Holcomb’s investigation resulted in a finding that the incident had been “in policy.” Brian had afterward gone on to distinguish himself as an outstanding officer, especially with his work on the David Mack bank robbery and the wider Rampart Scandal. He had, in fact, partnered with Russell Poole on various aspects of the case and had come out on record as saying that allegations of involvement by Rampart officers in the Wallace killing might well be true.

Tyndall was friendly and easygoing, with a perpetually positive attitude and the kind of seasoned outlook that accommodated an ability to stay above the fray. Part of that relaxed disposition probably had to do with the fact that, at the point when he took over the helm of the task force, he had been technically retired. One of the most lucrative perks available to a career policeman is called DROP (Deferred Retirement Option Program), which allows any officer of retirement age to stay on the job an additional five years at full salary while still collecting a pension. Tyndall was, in effect, being paid twice for doing the same job he’d always done. Small wonder he had a tolerant outlook on the sometimes tedious routines of police work. I wouldn’t say he lacked motivation: far from it. He was too professional for that. But whatever was going to happen or not happen in the new Biggie Smalls probe, Tyndall could well afford to take it all in stride.

The same could be said for Detective Bill Holcomb, another DROP beneficiary. While it’s easy to imagine Tyndall and Holcomb as complacent timeservers, content to sit out their delayed retirement while socking away piles of cash, that wasn’t really the case. Once the real work of the task force got under way, they both proved adept at running interference between the team’s more hands-on investigators and the LAPD administrators who were keeping a nervous eye on our progress. They were, in the truest sense of the term, “user-friendly” supervisors who made sure we had the freedom to pursue any and all leads while making the appropriate soothing sounds to placate the brass.

It was a job that, under the circumstances, required considerable diplomacy. Concurrent with the task force investigation, Internal Affairs was also continuing the probe into a possible police conspiracy. Both supervisors were required to provide IA with any and all information we might uncover relating directly to David Mack, Rafael Perez, and anyone else with connections, real or imagined, to Death Row and Suge Knight. At the same time, they also had to be careful to insure that whatever they shared would not result in our own efforts being shut down or taken over directly by IA. Navigating these conflicting interests required savvy political skills.

But from the onset there was another, more formidable hurdle to overcome: there was nothing to investigate. During Operation Transparency, Internal Affairs had carted off every last scrap of information and evidence related to the investigation and was keeping it under lock and key. Notwithstanding the city’s frantic demand that the case be solved immediately if not sooner, IA hung on to the murder books, leaving the task force nothing to work with. Short of starting the entire investigation again from scratch, the team had little choice but to wait patiently for IA to laboriously copy the reams of documents and return them in a slow and frustrating trickle. As the photocopies slowly piled up, Tyndall and Holcomb realized that it would take a herculean effort just to bring order to the case, never mind trying to actually move it forward. It was at that point that Tyndall began to expand the task force. I was his first call.

My answer was immediately and enthusiastically affirmative. The reason was simple: I wanted to solve the case. I wanted to solve it very badly. Of course, I also wanted to see justice done. I wanted the family, after so long, to finally know for sure who had killed Christopher Wallace and why. But what really motivated me was the chance to succeed where so many others had failed, to make the case my own.

CHAPTER
7

The Team

I
N MOVIES AND ON TV,
a team comes together when a mastermind assembles his specialized crew — the munitions expert, the computer geek, the muscleman, the femme fatale — to take on an impossible mission. In real life, it doesn’t exactly work that way. When Tyndall and Holcomb were charged with forming the Biggie Smalls task force, they had to balance many conflicting interests, only one of which was actually solving the case.

In putting together a law enforcement task force, one of the first general considerations is whether or not the target is “viable.” Viability usually means the likelihood of seizing assets that will help to offset the cost of funding the team itself. It’s an expensive proposition, usually far beyond the budgets of most police departments, to support an effective task force. Overtime, travel expenses and informant payments are only part of the bottom line. One of the most valuable tools in such investigations, for example, is a wiretap, which requires considerable outlay, first to the phone company for the installation of the eavesdropping equipment, then for the monitors hired to actually listen to and transcribe the conversations, hour after hour, day after day. Getting a task force off the ground means convincing the brass of a reasonable return on such investments.

In that regard, the revamped Biggie Smalls investigation had an advantage going in. Aside from our primary goal of bringing the killer or killers to justice, our success in solving the case would potentially be saving the department $500 million, the amount Judge Cooper had held out as a possible settlement for the Wallace family wrongful-death suit. Securing money and manpower was not going to be a major problem for us.

When a local task force is faced with funding restraints, the way the job usually gets done is by expanding the scope of the investigation. Bringing in other agencies can help to defray the costs and provide access to resources that would not normally be available. One of the first moves I made after answering Tyndall’s call was to push for the same kind of multi-pronged approach, but for very different reasons. It was immediately clear to me that the job was simply too big for the LAPD to handle by itself. We needed the best experts, the latest technology, and a long legal reach. There was only one place to go to get all that: the feds.

Federalizing the investigation made sense on a lot of levels, and accordingly, I approached Timothy Searight, assistant U.S. attorney for California’s Central District, with my proposal. I had worked with Searight on a couple of previous cases, most notably the Torres investigation, and knew him to be a smart and capable prosecutor. He immediately saw the potential in the approach I was pushing for and agreed to assist in deputizing the team as agents of the federal government. As a result, Searight would oversee the procedural aspects of the investigation, which would also be to our advantage, thanks to an important difference between federal and local prosecutorial methods. As an LAPD officer, my responsibility would have been to gather up enough evidence for a district attorney to decide whether the case was strong enough to go to trial. In the federal system, a U.S. attorney works with the investigators from the inception of a case, supervising its progress at each stage to maximize the potential for a successful prosecution. Searight, in short, would become a de facto member of the team.

With the lingering cloud of police involvement still hanging over the Biggie killing, having the presence of outside agencies on the team meant that it would be a lot harder for anyone to claim that we were just a tool of the LAPD, attempting to provide cover for its culpability.

At the same time we would benefit from the enhanced authority that a federalized task force would automatically wield. Being deputized allowed us to utilize a whole range of enforcement tools not normally within our jurisdiction, including the significantly enhanced sentencing guidelines that would come with a conviction in any federal court. If we were going to find the killer and any co-conspirators, a trial in federal court would ensure a punishment that fit the crime.

This was a key consideration in light of the stalled nature of the case itself. After nine years, the likelihood that we were going to uncover some revelatory new clue or turn up a witness who hadn’t already been interviewed a dozen times was pretty slim. The investigation had exhausted itself a long time ago and it was going to take some extraordinary incentives to pry new information from those who had told their story, stuck to it all along, and would have no good reason to cooperate with us this time around. Without the ability to exert new and serious pressure, all we would be doing was listening to the same shopworn tales one more time.

Opening the case up as a federal investigation would give us that leverage. With the resources and enforcement muscle of the FBI, the ATF, the DEA, and other federal agencies behind us, we could bring to bear all sorts of new legal incentives. The most compelling was the distinct possibility of Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) indictments, which provided stringent penalties for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization, up to and including twenty years on each and every racketeering count.

The logic was unassailable. Any investigation into the death of Biggie Smalls would have to immediately come to terms with the reality of the Bloods and Crips war that had been raging for close to a decade and would almost certainly be a factor in the murder. For example, the link between the Mob Piru Bloods subset of the Bloods and Suge Knight’s Death Row Records would be the logical place to start looking. If anyone within Death Row knew who killed Biggie and why, the threat of a RICO conviction might be all that was needed to get a target talking. We might finally be able to break the logjam that had blocked the case for so long.

Of course, focusing on Crips and Bloods as continuous criminal enterprises was hardly a new idea. Nor was the connection between gangs and rap record companies. “Rap music organizations were created with profits from existing criminal drug enterprises,” Bill Holcomb stated bluntly in an early task force memo. And while it was true that not all rap labels had criminal ties, Holcomb’s statement mirrored the widespread perception at the time regarding rap’s gangster connections.

The criminal links to rap reached back almost to the inception of black Los Angeles gangs themselves, a history that began in the mid-sixties when the original Crips were first formed. By the end of the decade, they ruled the streets of South Central L.A. until, in 1972, another group, centered on Piru Street in Compton, formed their own crew. To differentiate themselves from their rivals, who dressed in blue, the upstarts wore red, borrowed from the colors of Centennial High School, which many of them attended. They called themselves Bloods or, interchangeably, Pirus. There were eventually more than fifty separate and distinct subsets of the two gangs, funded primarily through the sale of marijuana and PCP, as well as robberies, burglaries, and auto thefts.

The late seventies experienced a terrifying escalation in gang power, fueled by the insidious rise of crack cocaine, which ushered in a new era of well regimented drug distribution networks. These criminal enterprises were overseen by the “O.G.s”, the original gangsters who had first formed the gangs. “Ballers” bought the rock cocaine and distributed it to a descending order of street peddlers, beginning with the “B.G.s” (Baby Gangsters) and on down to the “T.G.s” (Tiny Gangsters.)