Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (26 page)

Instead, he placed a frantic call to Daryn, begging for help. Dupree instructed him to contact the nearest law enforcement authorities. Sheriff’s officers were duly summoned and the story Stutterbox related to them managed to trump even the wildest tale he had told us. According to his account, he had been kidnapped by the Main Street Crips in retaliation for an elaborate blackmail scheme he had hatched to incriminate none other than the basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal.

Stutterbox claimed to have once been Shaq’s unofficial social director, organizing parties and functions for the sports star in and around the Los Angeles area. At one such event, Stutterbox would also assert, Shaq had ostensibly been filmed having sex with a woman other than his wife and Box had allegedly attempted to extort money by threatening to make the sex tapes public.

But the fantastic story didn’t stop there. O’Neal, as part of his role-model responsibilities, had agreed to participate in a South Central L.A. community outreach, lending his name to a campaign to raise money for children’s holiday gifts. The organizer of the event was none other than “Del Dog” Rowles, in a public-image ploy that is hardly unusual among gangsters. It was Stutterbox’s contention that Del Dog had taken exception to the extortion plot he had hatched against Shaq, and that the kidnapping and manhandling had been a warning for him to cease and desist.

It seemed more likely to us that he was actually being punished for not kicking back enough to the gang from his bank fraud operation, especially considering that Del Dog was known for requiring regular contributions from every Main Street Crip. But Sheriff’s Department investigators had a whole different take, immediately seeing the potential for a high-profile, headline-grabbing case. For sheriff’s investigators, Stutterbox was the victim of a criminal conspiracy. To us, he was the potential killer of Biggie Smalls. The whole notion that Shaq had been involved in such a caper was absurd on its face, yet another manifestation of Stutterbox’s runaway imagination.

But perhaps there was more to it. Maybe Box’s intention all along was to set the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department at odds. Tension developed over how to handle the case, even reaching into the task force itself, where team members on loan from the sheriff made it known that they disapproved of our efforts to establish a link between Ross and the murder we were investigating.

While it produced no sign of a sex tape, a subsequent search of Stutterbox’s home did turn up a good deal of O’Neal memorabilia, including a large autographed shoe, an NBA championship ring, and various photos of Shaq in the company of a beaming Stutterbox. The mementoes certainly strengthened his story of a connection between the two, but by that time I wasn’t buying anything he had to say, not without proof that I could touch, taste, and, if necessary, smell. I’d gone about as far down the yellow brick road with him as I cared to go.

Box’s whole house of cards finally collapsed when two South Central patrol officers received a call regarding a Lexus IS with no license plates being driven erratically down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, nearly striking a stoplight and straddling two lanes. The vehicle was pursued until it swung wide down a side street and abruptly came to a stop. Approaching the car, the officers detected pot smoke and saw the driver frantically attempting to conceal what later turned out to be a cache of rock cocaine and Ecstasy in the form of blue pills stamped with the image of a smiling Buddha.

It was Stutterbox. Skittish and high as a kite, he fled again as the officers approached the Lexus, and another high-speed chase ensued until he collided with a parked car and attempted to carjack a passing vehicle. Officers arrived as the frightened driver took off, leaving Ross to stumble down the street until he was apprehended and arrested. In a subsequent search of the area, officers discovered a stolen handgun Stutterbox had thrown away during the chase.

Suddenly, the tables were turned. With his prior history of narcotics and weapons convictions, we’d be able to hold hefty federal charges over his head, compelling his cooperation instead of the other way around. The Sheriff’s Department still insisted they wanted him as a material witness in the kidnapping case, but the U.S. attorney took our side and agreed to prosecute him on multiple counts. We had finally gotten Stutterbox in a box.

At that point, I was just relieved at the prospect of putting him behind bars until we could figure out exactly what part he played in all the interlocking aspects of the case. Dealing with Stutterbox had been exhausting, not least because of his ability to throw us off the track by opening up new possibilities just when we needed to narrow our options. Which is not to say we still weren’t haunted by the way he had found his way into our investigation. But sometimes coincidences are just that: accidents of fact and circumstance without any larger significance except maybe the haphazard workings of the universe. Sometimes Amir Muhammad is just a name. Sometimes the way a gangster holds a gun just means he’s watched one too many cop shows. In the end, the strange saga of Stutterbox added up to no more than a string of random occurrences expertly orchestrated by a masterful con artist.

Still, we had to follow it through to the end. After his arrest, we gave Stutterbox a lie detector test, asking him specifically about his knowledge of the Biggie Smalls murder. I’m not a big believer in polygraphs, especially when it comes to a subject like Stutterbox. His whole life, in one way or another, had been a lie. Did he even know what the truth
was
anymore? I had my doubts that lines on graph paper would serve to clear up the mystery of his complicity. Predictably, the results left us with more questions than answers. Stutterbox, the polygraph examiner informed us, had failed the test miserably. But what did that even mean? It might have confirmed that he knew nothing about the Biggie killing and was making up a story as he went along. Or it might be that he really
did
know who had done the deed and couldn’t pretend that he didn’t.

Either way it didn’t much matter. After months of bewildering complications, we had finally cleared away the smoke and mirrors surrounding Stutterbox. At that point my concern was that he’d never again have an opportunity to interfere with an investigation. I made it my business to draft a letter deeming him to be what is technically termed an Unreliable Informant. I couldn’t have thought of a better description if I’d tried.

PART

SIX

CHAPTER
21

Theresa

B
Y THE SPRING OF 2009,
the task force had been at work on the Biggie Smalls murder investigation and its ties to the death of Tupac Shakur for almost two years. In one respect we had made a lot of progress. Keffe D had led us to believe that it was Baby Lane Anderson who pulled the trigger in Las Vegas. If we could elicit confirmation of his account from Zip, half our case could well be made.

Which left the other half, and in that regard we had reached a frustrating impasse. As preparations proceeded to send Keffe D back to New York for a rendezvous with Zip, we took a hard look at the options left to us for breaking the Biggie case itself.

There weren’t many. Absent some major new revelation, we had pretty much exhausted every possibility that might lead to identifying the killer or killers. We had managed to eliminate many of the persistent rumors and half-truths that had for so long obscured the facts, but we weren’t any closer to uncovering precisely what those facts might actually be. Our surreal interlude with Stutterbox had proved how easy it was to get lost in the twists and turns of the investigation. After years of dogged effort, a definitive answer as to who killed Biggie and why had become an ever more elusive goal.

But we kept at it. We were convinced that somewhere in those file cabinets of police reports, interview transcripts, documents, and photographs comprising the sum total of the case,
something
had been overlooked. Because of our success in gaining Keffe D’s cooperation, we put our efforts into finding another candidate we could utilize in the same way. The problem wasn’t that there weren’t enough possible contenders. Almost every key individual with a role in the case had a checkered past and an uncertain future. What was needed was someone in Suge Knight’s inner circle privy to his most closely guarded secrets. It was there, we felt sure, that we would find the key to unlock the truth behind Biggie’s murder.

So we went back to square one, taking yet another pass at the federal probe into Death Row’s racketeering activities beginning in 1995, sifting through the welter of investigative details for something, anything, that might have escaped our attention. As the painstaking search went on, we gradually began to focus on a forty-two-year-old single mother of two by the name of Theresa Swann.

At first we weren’t really sure exactly whom we were dealing with. Swann seemed to have a number of distinct personas, revealed on a series of California driver’s license photos taken under ten different aliases in as many years. On one, her attractive features cluster around large dark eyes, radiating a look of wary regard for the world and its mess of troubles. On another, a middle-aged black woman with hoop earrings and straight, shoulder-length hair smiles into the camera. In yet another, a decidedly foxy party girl, heavily made up and strikingly attractive, fixes the camera with a cool appraising look. On a license issued in 2000, Theresa sports a modified afro that now lent her a slightly militant air. Two years earlier, she came off as a flirtatious forties vamp in a processed flip, her lips dark red. She had almost as many names as faces: Theresa Rennell Swann, Theresa Jazzmin Swann, Tamee Swann, Theresa Reed, Teresa Lynn Cross, and other variations on the theme. But as we closely studied all those pictures, tracking all the changes she had put herself through, it was hard to get a fix on who the real Theresa Swann might be. And the harder we looked, the more we wanted to know.

But the details of her life were likewise sketchy and contradictory. Born in Ohio, Theresa was one of three children sired by a pimp and small-time hustler. After the family fell apart, her mother took Theresa, her sister, and her brother west to Long Beach. Several years later Theresa, by now a strikingly attractive young woman, caught Suge’s eye. But she wasn’t the only one. Aside from his long-suffering wife, Sharitha, Suge’s roster of steady girlfriends — as distinguished from occasional hookups — included Michelle Toussaint, a vocalist known as Michel’le he had signed to Death Row. In this crowded field Theresa initially stood out. Aside from her good looks, she had curried Suge’s favor by becoming his all-purpose go-to girl, ready and willing to roll with him on any number of criminal enterprises. Before long she had transformed herself, for all intents and purposes, into his accomplice. She also joined the burgeoning ranks of Suge’s baby mamas, giving birth to Suge’s daughter in 2004.