Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (12 page)

CHAPTER
8

Clearing The Rubble

F
ROM THE MOMENT WE OPENED
for business in May 2006 the team made it our first order of business to deal with some of the raft of rumors and unanswered questions that had dogged the investigation from the beginning.

The first one we tackled was the belief that the 1995 white Toyota Land Cruiser, seen on Fairfax Avenue on the night of the shooting, was part of a wider criminal conspiracy. The conjecture was that the vehicle, which had made an abrupt U-turn on the four-lane street and tried to wedge itself between the back up cars in Biggie’s caravan, was proof that the hit was the result of a well-executed operation involving multiple plotters. The Toyota had deliberately attempted to cut off the follow-up SUVs, the theory went, preventing the bodyguards from rushing to Wallace’s aid. Much was made of its sudden and mysterious appearance, not to mention its abrupt and complete disappearance.

But the real story was much simpler and not without an element of absurdity. In the white Land Cruiser that night were the two hapless hangers-on Scott Shepherd, who had come to California hoping to promote Biggie’s birthday as a gala entertainment event, and his pal, the screenwriter Ernest “Troia” Anderson, who wanted to write a biopic of the rapper’s life. On the night of the murder, Shepherd and Anderson had tagged along behind the entourage from the Westwood Marquee to the Vibe party. In the ensuing chaos outside the Petersen, Shepherd had tried to shoehorn his way back into the departing convoy in the hope of eventually cornering Biggie with his proposal at the evening’s next stop, the after-after-party hosted by a record executive. When shots rang out, the frightened pair took off at top speed.

Troia was nothing if not persistent. Years later his number would frequently pop up on Suge Knight’s phone records. It seems that Anderson was now interested in the life story of the gangster music mogul.

As with the white Land Cruiser, the mysterious black Bronco seen on South Orange Grove Avenue just after midnight was likewise easily explained. More than one eyewitness had reported hearing a single shot being fired from the vehicle, and ever since, speculation had revolved around a diversionary tactic designed to distract attention from the main target.

The reality was considerably more mundane, if not downright laughable. On the night of the murder, two Wilshire Division patrol officers received a call for assistance from Fire Department personnel on the scene at the Petersen. They called in a report of the gunfire and eyewitness accounts of a male African American fleeing the scene, southbound on Orange Grove Avenue. A bystander had seen the license plate and reported it to a Fire Department official who had passed it along to the patrolmen. Subsequently, as the officers were assisting in crowd control after Biggie was shot, a black Ford Explorer — not a Bronco — with plates matching the earlier description pulled over next to them on Wilshire Boulevard.

“Who got shot?” asked the unsuspecting driver. Instead of answering, the officers immediately took him and his passenger into custody. A subsequent search of the Explorer revealed a .25-caliber semiautomatic handgun in the map pocket of the driver side door. When questioned about the weapon and the shot fired, the driver produced a bizarre, but perfectly plausible, explanation. He and his friend had arrived at the Petersen in hopes of gaining entrance to the Vibe party. As they opened the car door to make their way to the museum entrance, his firearm fell out of the map pocket and onto the street. Concerned that the weapon might be damaged, he fired it into the air to see if it still worked. Spooked by the crowd’s panicked reaction, he peeled out, only to return later to see what all the excitement was about, and was promptly arrested for illegal discharge of a firearm. The officer’s report had been sitting all along in the case files.

A careful study of the initial investigation revealed that, far from the accusations of ineptitude that had dogged the police from the earliest hours following the murder, there had been a lot of solid work done, most notably by Detective Kelly Cooper, the lead officer on the case and the same bluff and by-the-book veteran who had been one of Daryn’s training officers in homicide. Cooper and his team had fanned out in the days following the shooting, taking statements from anyone and everyone with even the slightest tangential connection to the case. Vibe employees helping to host the party; passing motorists and the RTD bus driver on the Wilshire route; the Petersen maintenance supervisor; LAFD personnel at the scene; clerks at the various hotels where Biggie and his posse stayed; boyfriends and girlfriends and the family relations of countless individuals on the scene — virtually no one escaped their attention.

A complete investigation of Gecko ammunition, the relatively rare type of slug that killed Biggie, was launched, and the only two distributors in the country, based in California and New Jersey, were contacted. The sales brochure of a 1996 Chevy Impala SS was procured and carefully studied, while the Air Support Division was summoned to fly over a South Central location where a black Impala had been reportedly stashed. Surveillance tapes provided by Petersen security and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center were scrutinized, and detectives would fly to Texas to interview the Houston fans who had shot the jittery video from their van across Fairfax in the minutes leading up to the murder. They would also fly to Teaneck, New Jersey, to inform Voletta Wallace of the investigation’s progress and, in return, would receive a visit from narcotics officers in Teaneck who had contacted LAPD to appraise them of an indictment on drug charges that was being prepared against Christopher Wallace and others. As a result, additional officers were assigned to serve as a liaison with the New Jersey investigators.

Assisting in the early stages of the case was Tim Brennan. Blondie’s gang expertise would prove especially useful in the initial phase of the probe, and he was able to single out suspects worthy of special attention from investigators. Among them were such noted gang members as Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, Shayne Catskill, Aaron “Heron” Palmer and the Crip shot caller Duane Keith “Keffe D” Davis, all of whom had served time for a variety of offenses. It was Keffe D who had been described by at least one witness as a friend of Puffy’s and had been seen talking with Biggie at the Petersen shortly before the shooting. These names would regularly appear and reappear as the investigation progressed, with Brennan’s input particularly invaluable for detectives trying to tie the murder to the ongoing gang feuds in which Keffe D and the others were involved.

But, as is the case with any high-profile investigation, there was also an abundance of complete dead ends. Detectives found themselves, for example, expending valuable time and resources chasing down a random ATM card found at the crime scene that in the end proved to be nothing more than a careless loss by its owner, caught in the stampede outside the Petersen.

Tips, anonymous and otherwise, flooded in. Local and national press coverage was carefully cataloged, and the television program
America’s Most Wanted
passed along a fax received by producers claiming the existence of a videotape revealing the killer’s identity. A woman who gave her name only as “Barbara” called to tell police that her daughter had information relevant to the case. The Kern County Sheriff’s Department contacted the task force with the news that they had someone in custody who insisted that Biggie’s killer was a man named “Rodney.” Shown a composite sketch of the shooter, an informant absolutely, positively indentified him as a Grape Street Crips member named “Mike.” The abundance of vague hunches, wild guesses, gut feelings, and suspects known only by their first names continued unabated for months. Each one needed to be treated seriously by detectives, but it was an overwhelming task. It’s a tried-and-true law of police work that the more time elapses after the crime is committed, the colder the case gets, and increasingly the investigators could feel this case slipping away from them.

Yet, in the final analysis, Cooper and his team had conducted a thorough and exhaustive investigation, one that in time would provide a strong foundation for our resurrected case. The fact that investigating officers ultimately failed to find the killer had nothing to do with incompetence or police complicity and everything to do with rampant speculation on the street and in the press. The outcry would reach a near-hysterical pitch in the weeks following the murder, producing a thick cloud of confusion and cross-purposes that hung persistently over the case. Cooper had done his best to clamp a lid on the rising tide of rumors and hearsay, immediately sequestering, among other evidence, Wallace’s autopsy file. “A lot of people are naturally curious about this case,” he commented in a ringing understatement. “So we placed a security hold on it so no information could get out.”

It was far too late for that. But Cooper soldiered on, doggedly continuing with the essential, if often fruitless, legwork required in any homicide investigation. And, tentative as it might have been, he was beginning to make some headway. Even in those early stages, suggestions of an intriguing connection to another high-profile case were already beginning to surface. In the mandatory sixty-day Murder Investigation Progress Report, based on material gathered by Cooper and his team, officers reported receiving “several anonymous calls saying that Wallace’s homicide was related to the death of Tupac Shakur.” Such vague but persistent inklings would in time become an important focus of the ongoing Biggie investigation. Detectives contacted the Las Vegas Police Department, requesting to be updated on developments in the still-unsolved Shakur murder. A subsequent report, issued six months after the murder, dealt with “the possibility of an ongoing feud between the victim’s recording company (Bad Boy Entertainment) and Death Row Records, owned by Marion (Suge) Knight.”

It described two key incidents, one in late 1994, the other a year later. The first occurred at a New York recording studio where unknown assailants had shot and gravely wounded Tupac in an apparent robbery attempt. The other had happened in a private club in Atlanta and pitted a Death Row posse against a Bad Boy crew, resulting in the shooting death of Suge Knight’s bodyguard Jake Robles. The link between these two incidents and the Biggie shooting was, at best, tenuous, but detectives were increasingly convinced that their investigation would eventually turn on the bloody feud between the gangs and their affiliated rap labels. “Detectives have conducted approximately one hundred interviews of both Crip and Blood members,” the report concluded, “in hopes of obtaining information relating to this murder and other unsolved crimes.”

Those hopes were thwarted when in April, a little more than a month after the murder, the case was effectively taken out of Cooper’s hands and transferred downtown to the Robbery-Homicide Division, under the auspices of the lead investigator, Russell Poole, who would turn the investigation in an entirely different direction, focusing almost solely on the possibility of a police conspiracy.

The lines Poole would draw between the outlaw elements at Rampart Division and the gang activity swirling around Death Row Records would exert a powerful hold on public perception. David Mack, Rafael Perez, and a handful of other rogue cops would be linked by Poole’s theory to Suge Knight’s criminal enterprise, despite the fact that direct evidence of such a connection had never been established. The most common misconception is that the officers had been hired as Death Row security. It’s certainly true that many police officers moonlight on a regular basis, as demonstrated by the presence of the Inglewood cop Reggie Blaylock on the Bad Boy bodyguard squad for the Soul Train celebrations. But, while different jurisdictions have different regulations concerning outside employment, no department would ever sanction an officer hiring himself out to a known criminal enterprise. Despite numerous and persistent reports to the contrary, neither Mack nor Perez nor anyone else in the LAPD, with the exception of a bit player from Newton named Richard McCauley, were ever on the Death Row payroll.

Of all the possible conjectures our task force would have to wrestle to the ground in the initial phase of the reopened investigation, those put forth by Poole were by far the most entrenched. After joining the team, I immediately picked up a copy of
LAbyrinth
, the 2002 book written by Randall Sullivan, which laid out Poole’s theory in great detail. Central to that account was the mysterious Amir Muhammad, who had left his name on the visitors’ log at the Montebello City Jail when he came to see David Mack. For anyone, and there were many, who accepted Poole’s version of events leading up to March 9, 1997, Amir Muhammad was the key that would unlock the truth of a deep-rooted police conspiracy. But the key didn’t fit and Amir turned out to be a lot less sinister than Poole had posited. He was eventually revealed to be Harry Billups, who, as an avowed Muslim, had changed his name to Amir Muhammad. Billups had a reasonable alibi for paying a call on the prisoner. He and Mack were friends, having attended the University of Oregon together, where they had been on the track and field team. Be that as it may, Poole’s accusations stuck and Billups was promptly fingered as being the possible hit man at the Petersen. It didn’t help that he bore a passing resemblance to the figure with the bow tie and fade haircut outside the museum, or Bad Boy bodyguard Eugene Deal would tentatively identify him as the “Nation Of Islam guy” behind the wheel of the Impala. Yet, through it all, Billups staunchly maintained his innocence. “I’m not a murderer, I’m a mortgage broker,” he told the
Los Angeles Times
before the paper was forced to retract a story connecting him with the Biggie slaying.