Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (11 page)

The plague of smokable, instantly addictive cocaine was a financial windfall of unprecedented dimensions in modern criminal history. At the same time, the reach of the Crips and Bloods radiated steadily outward from South Central L.A., as they established chapters across the country, ruthlessly eliminating local competition in the drug trade. The enormous profits swelling gang coffers gave rise to what would become known as the “gangster lifestyle,” which would find its most popular expression in gangsta rap. Street-corner MCs celebrated in rhythm and rhyme their gangster heroes and were, in turn, provided with recording budgets paid for with drug proceeds. This close association between music and mobsters began with such gangster rap pioneers as Eric “Easy E” Wright, a known affiliate of the Atlantic Drive and the Kelly Park Crips. “Easy E’s” groundbreaking company Ruthless Records had been directly financed by drug cash, a fact widely attested to even on the rapper’s posthumous Facebook posting, as well by such music industry journalists as David N. Howard in his book
Sonic Alchemy
.

By the early nineties, rap music had become far and away the most popular form of music in the world. Gangster rap was its most potent variant, a myth-making music that often chronicled the bloody rivalry between Crips and Bloods.

Given that rivalry, and the part it almost certainly played in the murder we were investigating, I advised Tyndall and Holcomb to split the focus of the task force, gathering information on the Crips into a case file dubbed “
Menace II Society
,” while anything having to do with Mob Piru became part of another file called “
Rap It Up
.” It was a way to bring order and manageability to an already complicated case.

But the complications were just beginning. The most daunting task we faced in the first days was picking the right personnel. In the process, we came up hard against a long-established view within the LAPD that detectives are more or less interchangeable. It was an attitude I encountered early in my tenure with the Robbery-Homicide Division, when I heard a commander say that, in his opinion, any detective should be able to take over a case from any other detective at a moment’s notice. I wondered at the time what, if that were true, was the point of developing specific areas of crime-fighting expertise, but I’d long since given up expecting an answer.

In fact, my first priority after joining the task force was to proactively gather officers with the specialized knowledge and experience that the investigation would require. My first candidate was Daryn Dupree. After his stint at the Wilshire Division, first in the CRASH unit and then as a homicide investigator, Daryn had been transferred to West Bureau Gangs in recognition of his extraordinary expertise in many aspects of Los Angeles gang activity. While gang involvement was virtually a given in the Biggie shooting, what was even more telling was that the killing had occurred at the interface of street gangs and the rap music business. Daryn had a deep knowledge of how and where these realms overlapped and of the complex gangster influence on the rap industry and vice versa. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was also a close friend. Even though his superiors, in light of his track record, were reluctant to let him go, Daryn quickly became the newest member of the task force.

Another selection was Alan Hunter, who seemed like a logical choice, primarily because he had considerable gang experience, as both a member of the Wilshire CRASH unit and a detective in RHD. Quiet and outwardly unassuming, Hunter was in fact a tightly wound officer with a low threshold for aggressive behavior. A competent if not exactly creative detective, Alan had trouble thinking outside the box, and if there was one thing the Biggie Smalls case needed, it was innovative approaches to the formidable challenges we faced. In contrast, Alan’s investigative technique was tethered to a textbook application of routine police work. Moreover, in a job that required all the cooperating witnesses we could get, Alan’s in-your-face interrogation techniques would serve to alienate some of the same people we were trying to win over.

Other choices, however, would quickly prove their merit. Deputy Tim Brennan of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department was a former Compton cop, known throughout the ‘hood as “Blondie.” Brennan had made it his business to become the unofficial historian of the city’s streets and had a wealth of specialized knowledge regarding Southside Crips and Blood gangs. Unfortunately, it came at a price. There was a trace of apprehension toward Blondie among the other task force members due to his links with a small core of ex-Compton cops who had gone on to work security for Death Row Records.

It was an apprehension that reached deep into the wider ranks of the LAPD. Because it was outside city limits, Compton was not within the department’s jurisdiction. Being part of the county, it fell instead under the County Sheriff’s purview. From the time it was first incorporated in 1888, the feisty municipality had opted to oversee its own law enforcement, appointing a city marshal to circumvent county control. A century later, the reputation of the Compton Police Department was among the most tarnished in the nation. It was for that reason, among others, that the city council disbanded it in 2000 and turned policing authority over to the Sheriff’s Department.

The stench of that corruption inevitably clung to anyone who had served time in the Compton police department. Given our increasing belief in gang involvement in the Biggie homicide, such qualms were understandable, but it only meant Brennan would work that much harder to allay our suspicions and render valuable service to the team. On both counts he performed admirably.

Three more recruits would eventually join the task force, the first being an LAPD investigator named Frank Trujillo whose background with Internal Affairs provided an important liaison function with a department that was running its own probe into many of the same areas where we were venturing. Another LAPD officer, named Omar Bazulto, who would soon show his mettle as an analyst and field agent, also came aboard. So, too, did a series of agents assigned to us by the FBI as part of our multi-agency task force, eventually including Jeff Bennett, whose usefulness was hampered by his limited experience. He had been with the Bureau for only two years prior to joining us.

Within a few days of receiving the call from Tyndall, I joined the rest of the team for an initial debriefing and orientation. It was only then that I began to realize the magnitude of the job with which we’d been tasked. The volumes of evidentiary material that Internal Affairs had confiscated as part of Operation Transparency had only just been returned, and the material was in a state of complete disorganization. Within those tens of thousands of random pages were scores of witness interviews, reams of field reports, and piles of often-indecipherable handwritten detective notes, running down every theory and conjecture relating to the murder, no matter how absurd or incidental, from the first moments of the shooting to the point where the whole case collapsed under its own weight.

As if all that were not enough to deal with, we were also bequeathed with, thanks to our newly federalized status, the results of an exhaustive FBI investigation into the racketeering activities of Death Row Records that had lasted from 1995 to 2001. The probe had been thwarted by the events of September 11, which, of course, required an extensive reallocation of the Bureau’s resources and manpower. But the massive evidence files still existed on the FBI database and were accordingly dumped in our laps.

Before we could even begin the job of sorting through the ruins of the case, we needed a place to work. We headed to the basement supply room to pick up the desks, chairs, computers, and filing cabinets we would need to furnish the offices that had been assigned to us in the headquarters of the Robbery-Homicide Division. So sensitive was the brass to the integrity of the investigation that we were each given a key to the room along with strict orders that no one was to be allowed to enter without our express knowledge and permission. We subsequently acquired workspace at the DEA office as well, a mile away in downtown Los Angeles.

Over the course of the first month, Daryn and I took the lead in reorganizing the murder books, in the process constructing an extensive flow chart replete with the name, affiliation, and, where possible, photo of every witness, suspect, bystander, and tangential player that figured, however marginally, into the case. Lines of association connected each and the chart was color-coded for easy reference. The result occupied an entire wall in the task force office and became a primary tool for the team as the investigation moved forward.

As we began to slowly absorb the sprawling scope of what we were facing, it became increasingly apparent there were elements of the case that would require an entirely new kind of investigative approach. The challenge wasn’t simply in the time that had elapsed since the killing, the witnesses who had since died, or the key evidence that had vanished. It wasn’t even the fact that the killer or killers had had nine years to cover their tracks. What really made the case unique was that it had been pushed far past hard evidence and quantifiable facts and into the realm of rampant rumor and speculation. Biggie’s murder was freighted with different meanings to different people: police conspiracy; rap war revenge; gang retaliation. Over the course of nearly a decade, all those different interpretations had undergone steady expansion and elaboration. The task force that had assembled under that wall-sized flow chart didn’t have to just solve a murder case. It had to unravel dozens of versions of the same event, each with its own means, motive, and opportunity. Closing the case would require teasing out the truth from all the baggage it had accumulated.

The only way to do that, I concluded, would be to conduct the investigation from the outside
in
. We would tackle every theory, no matter how harebrained, treating it as real until it could be proven otherwise and disposing of them one by one until eventually we arrived at the one that could not be disproved or discredited. That, by the process of elimination, would be the truth.

Los Angeles Police Department Detective Daryn Dupree, whose outstanding work was instrumental in solving the murders of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

Murder Rap author and former Los Angeles Police Department Detective Greg Kading.

PART

THREE