Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (27 page)

Nevertheless, Theresa found herself constantly competing for Suge’s attention with Sharitha and Michel’le, both of whom had prior claims and their own offspring to back them up. Michel’le, in particular, gave Theresa a run for her money. She was far and away Suge’s favorite, with his attraction measured in, among other things, cold cash. After he was sent back to prison on the MGM Grand parole violation Suge arranged for his brother-in-law Norris Anderson to keep his business and personal affairs in order. The day-to-day administration of Death Row became Norris’s responsibility, as did the doling out of support payments to Suge’s women. Both Theresa and Sharitha received a paltry $1,500 a month from the father of their children. Michel’le’s stipend, on the other hand, was a hefty $10,000.

Suge even went so far as to devise an elaborate scheme to allow Michel’le conjugal visits while he was serving his sentence. This prison privilege, of course, is extended only to husband and wife, and Suge had no intention of dumping the dependable Sharitha. Instead, he induced his brother-in-law Norris Anderson to pose as Suge Knight at the altar, marry Michel’le and thus clear the way for her to satisfy his needs behind bars on a regular basis. For his part Anderson denies any involvement in the charade, and handwriting analysis of the marriage certificate proved inconclusive. It is, nevertheless, interesting to speculate that Michel’le might have became the second wife of Norris Anderson, or maybe Suge Knight, or maybe both of them, depending on how you looked at it.

Whatever she may have lacked in competition with her younger rival, Theresa tried to make up for in sheer unstinting devotion to Suge. In the nearly two decades of their relationship, she carried out a remarkable range of illegal activities on his behalf, from fraud to fencing to tax evasion and beyond, in the process becoming his de facto white-collar-criminal proxy. But that wasn’t her only role. On occasion Theresa was a source of almost maternal comfort, as demonstrated when Suge was involved in one of his periodic brawls, this one leaving him bleeding and battered on a Hollywood street before being hauled away by his posse. He was taken directly to Theresa, who treated his wounds with tender, loving care.

But it was her function as his criminal consort that most interested us. Not that Theresa didn’t possess her own well-honed criminal tendencies: She was arrested in 1991 on Grand Theft Property charges and a year later served a brief jail sentence for possession of a controlled substance. But by 1993 she was firmly under Suge’s sway, doing his exclusive bidding, and it was through meticulously reconstructing the record of their relationship that we came to realize how essential Theresa Swann was to Suge Knight and his ambitions. Her name appeared early in the federal Death Row investigation as the “straw purchaser” of a Ferrari Testarossa, bought outright for $75,000 in cash. Registered to her, it was almost certainly Suge’s ride. Shortly thereafter, she was listed as the president, secretary, and treasurer of Simon Productions, a Nevada company that served as a front for Death Row. There seemed to us an obvious link between the two businesses: Suge had had the nickname “Simon” since childhood, as in the game Simon Says: when Simon said it, you did it.

It was through Simon Productions that an operating license had been obtained for Suge’s Las Vegas nightspot, Club 662, a transaction rumored to involve a payoff to a senior investigator for the Clark County Department of Business License. According to FBI reports, Swann was instrumental in finding a dummy owner and manager for the club, coaching the club’s security guard on how to apply for the license and appear credible before the board. The guard was officially the manager when Club 662 opened in the late summer of 1996, operating it for only a few weekends prior to the fateful night of Tupac’s death, after which it was closed for good.

In another intriguing wrinkle, Swann’s name appeared on a transfer of ownership for a Los Angeles body shop that served as a Suge Knight front and was eventually sold to help fund Club 662. Theresa had, in fact, increasingly become the possessor of record on a number of assets that, in reality, were owned, or least claimed, by Suge. When, for example, Suge and his Piru posse hauled away the airbrushed 1961 Impala from outside Armando Hermosillo’s garage, it was Theresa who subsequently pawned the car, signing for the loan in her name.

In order to accommodate all the fraudulent transactions Suge required, it was necessary for Theresa to assemble her gallery of false identities. Once we established that she was using multiple driver’s licenses, we did a complete workup of her DMV history, cross-referencing birth dates, residences, fingerprints, and handwriting. We came up with a comprehensive catalog of the many faces of Theresa Swann, but it was not quite enough on which to proceed. Obtaining a driver’s license under an assumed name is a felony punishable by up to three years in prison, but the statute is very rarely enforced and we had to have something more than the possibility of a small fine or suspended sentence to compel Theresa’s cooperation.

So we kept looking, setting up surveillance of her house, once owned by Suge, in the middle-class suburb of Rancho Cucamonga, east of Los Angeles. It was there that Theresa lived with her daughter by Suge, as well as her teenage son from an earlier relationship. Also occupying the house was Theresa’s brother, who at the time was out of prison on parole. The children attended nearby public schools and Theresa worked hard to create the appearance of a brave single mother doing her best to bring her kids up right.

Appearances were deceiving. Keeping a close eye on the location, we gathered increasing evidence of Theresa’s ongoing association with Suge. Along with a Range Rover they both routinely drove, two other cars were often parked in the driveway of the ranch-style residence. The first was a Ford F150 pickup, decked out in a pricey black-and-red-trimmed Harley-Davidson package. Suge had used the truck up until the time he had been evicted from his high-priced West L.A. condo and had since stored it at the Rancho Cucamonga premises. The other vehicle was a Maserati Gran Turismo that Suge had once used to make an ostentatious appearance at a Blood’s gang funeral. We looked into the sports car’s history and discovered that it was registered in the name of Rodrigo Lopez, who Stutterbox had claimed was the alleged Mexican drug supplier that he had met in Las Vegas in the company of Suge. We would eventually set up a traffic stop specifically to pull Theresa over as she drove the Maserati around town. We were trying to establish another link between her and Suge, but we were really just shooting in the dark. It’s not against the law to associate with a bad man, or even to visit him in jail seventy-five times over a two-year period. We needed something considerably more incriminating if we were going to get Theresa Swann to talk.

It was in late February 2009 that we finally began to open up the lead we were seeking. As part of our investigation into Knight’s possible bankruptcy fraud, we’d found documents indicating that Suge had tried to transfer some Death Row master tapes to Theresa’s name, thereby taking them off his liquidation list and out from under the scrutiny of the court. Looking closer at the possibility that Theresa had been an accessory to the deception, we discovered that the woman who had initially found the tape cache in a Detroit storage facility had subsequently received a call from Swann, who, she claimed, had made a number of thinly veiled threats. Since this was in large part a tax matter, we recruited an Internal Revenue Service agent to help us sort out the complex financial aspects of the investigation.

In the meantime we got word of even more significant charges being developed against Swann by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Their investigation targeted a sophisticated ring of thieves who submitted false auto-loan applications to buy vehicles, which they then turned around and sold for bargain prices. According to the sheriff’s Commercial Crimes Unit, Swann was front and center in the operation. Accordingly, a raid on her residence was conducted by sheriff’s deputies, during which a weapon first reported stolen in Seattle was recovered. Her brother, a former convict, was forbidden by law to have a weapon in the house and could potentially be charged with a weapons violation.

We now had several promising approaches to encourage Theresa’s cooperation. She was arrested by the Sheriff’s Department and subsequently informed of the charges pending against her as a key player in the auto-loan scam and the potential bankruptcy fraud, as well as complicity in her brother’s weapons violation. The deputies suggested that Swann might want to talk with us, assuring her that, depending on her decision, they would hold off on making formal charges on the auto-loan counts. Swann tentatively agreed to the meeting.

It seemed at last that we had some real pressure to apply. But it was based on the premise that there was something more important in Theresa’s life than loyalty to Suge Knight. There was no way to be certain, but we had reason to hope that retaining custody of her children might outweigh her twenty-year run with Sugar Bear.

CHAPTER
22

Starbucks

E
VEN UNDER DURESS,
Theresa Swann still managed to put herself together nicely. She arrived at our meeting on March 17, 2009, stylishly attired in an outfit accentuating her slim, well-toned figure, sporting her trademark hoop earrings, her hair decorously pulled back and her makeup understated. She looked to all appearances like the upstanding suburban mom she had for so long pretended to be.

But it was clear from the deepening lines in her narrow face, and the way her eyes flickered with suspicion, that maintaining her double life was taking its toll. Gone was the sultry party girl who had gazed provocatively from the photos of her fake driver’s license. The Theresa Swann who introduced herself to us that day in a low and uninflected voice had the kind of desperation that comes when every disguise is stripped away and there’s no place left to hide.

We met her on a cloudless morning at a Starbucks in Santa Fe Springs. There’s something about the soothing wood tones and the laid-back ambiance of a Starbucks that is conducive to this kind of charged encounter. It seems to put even the most wary criminal in a more amenable frame of mind, and that was an especially important consideration when it came to Theresa Swann.

To that end, Jeff Bennett had been in contact with her a few times prior to our sitdown. It wasn’t that Daryn and I were going to play bad cop to Bennett’s good cop. Rather, our aim was to provide a reference point for her, someone with whom she had become familiar, who had taken the time to listen to her story. Jeff got the job. It was a role we’d all played before, and while it might seem calculated it served an important purpose. We were about to ask Theresa Swann to do something that went against her every instinct: drop the dime on Suge Knight. To the degree that we were dealing with a woman who had made a career out of deception, we were sympathetic. But the reality was that she had brought this on herself. She had made the choice to become a willing accomplice to Suge Knight. What we hoped to do was to give her another option, to help her find a way out. It was a second chance that would begin with her coming clean.

Aside from Dupree, Bennett, and I, we had brought our IRS investigator along for the meeting. There was a good reason for such a conspicuous contingent. It was important for Theresa to assume that our questions would be confined to the matters at hand: the auto loan case being handled by sheriff’s investigators and the bankruptcy fraud charges, which were under IRS jurisdiction. Depending on how
that
went, and as we evaluated her reaction to a charge of criminal complicity with Suge Knight, we could hopefully move on to topic A: the man himself.

If Swann was disconcerted to see four law enforcement officers waiting for her, she didn’t show it. At least, there was no visible reaction in her expression as she sat down with her caramel macchiato. Instead, a steely skepticism hardened her features, belying any hint of fear or intimidation. Jeff Bennett’s role notwithstanding, if we wanted to gain her trust we were going to have to earn it.

Initially she evinced no reaction when we outlined what she might be facing in the auto-loan case. It seemed likely that she was prepared to call our bluff on the charges and take her chances before a judge and jury. Then the IRS agent laid out the bankruptcy case with the kind of calm and professional dispassion that they must teach at IRS school. I watched Theresa’s face carefully as he recited the applicable tax law and explained what fraud meant to Theresa’s prospects for staying out of jail and, by unspoken implication, maintaining custody of her children. I couldn’t be sure, but by the end of that grim litany, I thought I saw the first faint traces of comprehension beginning to dawn in her dark eyes.