Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (32 page)

But this was different. I knew, as I came to believe that the LAPD also knew, that taking me off the case would stop it in its tracks. I’d seen it happen too many times. A detective, or a team of detectives, who gave their all to an investigation, get transferred or reassigned or moved along for whatever reason. Lacking the motivating force of those individuals who have pushed a case forward by dedication and sheer hard work, an investigation withers and dies, the guilty go free, and the innocent are denied justice.

It had happened with Joannie McNamara, my training officer back at Newton, when she was yanked from the original Torres case after threats were made on her life. It had happened to the FBI and ATF task force that had worked so long to build a RICO prosecution against Death Row Records, only to be reassigned in the wake of 9/11. Now it was happening to me.

Over the course of my tenure with the task force, I had taken on the role of leader, not just because I wanted it, but because I deserved it. I worked night and day on the most challenging investigation of my career. But that wasn’t the only reason and not even the most important one. There were people who needed to know what had happened. It wasn’t just the family and friends of Biggie and Tupac who deserved those answers. It was the public at large, the ones who paid my salary to solve crimes. I owed it to them to complete the task I’d been assigned as much as I owed it to myself to finish what I’d started.

Now, without warning, at the one-yard line in the final minute of the fourth quarter, I was being pulled from the game. I wanted to scream, to punch something, to upend Gannon’s big oak desk. But instead I just stood there, vaguely aware of the commander’s voice droning in the background. “I wanted to meet with you to offer you the chance to express your opinion,” he was saying and for a moment my tears nearly turned to bitter laughter. What good would my opinion do? The decision had already been made and there was no doubt that it was final. I deserved to know why this was happening. I’d earned that right. But that didn’t mean I was going to get it. Nothing I could say was going to prompt them to open this can of worms and let me peek inside. But, in that moment, I just couldn’t help myself.

“Why?” I asked.

Gannon barely blinked. It was as if, anticipating the question, he had already rehearsed the answer. “Allegations were made in the Torres case,” he told me. “We know they’re baseless, Greg, totally without foundation. But there’s a perception out there and we’re concerned that it might work against you and the Biggie case. This is for the best. Believe me.”

I knew as soon as I heard his justification that it was utterly pointless to remind him of the facts. The Torres defense team had succeeded in making the trial about me. The mistakes I had made on the search warrant were completely irrelevant to the substance of the charges against the grocery man. I had obediently toed the department line, repeatedly responding to press questioning with the obligatory “No comment.” I had never been allowed to refute accusations against me due to Searight’s fateful decision not to call me as a prosecution witness. But none of that mattered. There was, in Gannon’s words, “a perception.” For the LAPD that perception had become reality.

But even as I realized the tawdry reality of what he was saying, I knew it wasn’t the whole story. The LAPD was far too experienced in having their actions and inactions tried in the court of public opinion to really take the accusations made against me all that seriously. They knew what bad press was about and had long since learned to take it in stride. I firmly believe that the reason I had been taken off the investigation had, in the end, less to do with the Torres case than with other, more cynical calculations.

On the morning I met with Commander Gannon, the Biggie Smalls investigation had remained unsolved for 4,448 days. The only reason it had been resurrected in 2006 was because of the threat of a massive judgment against the department in the civil suit brought by the Wallace family. That suit had been fueled by Russell Poole’s theory implicating the police. But we had all but totally disproved that particular hypothesis, once and forever. There was no police conspiracy. There never had been and the exculpatory truth we had so painstakingly uncovered would, I’m certain, become the key to the department’s subsequent deliberations.

Shortly before I was called into Gannon’s office, the LAPD had received the opinion of an outside law firm retained to weigh the likely result of the civil suit should it come to trial. The conclusion: the LAPD should consider settling for $2 million, a price that would, in all probability, be far exceeded by the costs of a trial, particularly given the unpredictable nature of many civil proceedings. The LAPD, in short, was still vulnerable to what the attorneys termed “death by a thousand cuts,” the slow whittling away of credibility by the family’s lawyers, which could ultimately sway the jury in a city where mistrust of the police was rampant.

But the LAPD decided not to take that advice. The reason, I believe, was simple: by the diligent efforts of the task force, we had decisively undercut the rationale that had spawned the civil case in the first place. If push came to shove in court on the issue of police involvement in the murder, all they would have to do was produce the evidence we had obtained. The LAPD was effectively off the hook. And the task force had outlived its usefulness.

But what about the murderers, and the murdered? What about the long arm of the law? Of course, the alleged shooters, Baby Lane and Poochie, had long been in their graves. But what about the evidence that pointed to the involvement of others? Did it matter that those individuals were still walking free, or that the crimes we suspected they had committed would now almost certainly go unpunished?

It’s my belief that the LAPD carefully weighed its options and decided that, all things considered, it best suited them to let sleeping dogs lie. It also stands to reason that there were other considerations that figured into the decision. They knew, because we had kept them up to date on our progress, that tapping Suge Knight’s phone might provide the critical mass of evidence required to file charges. After that, in the midst of the inevitable media frenzy that would ensue, all bets were off. Any defense lawyer worth his exorbitant fee would resurrect the well-worn speculation of police involvement, accusing the department of railroading Suge to keep its dark secrets hidden. In all likelihood, and given the case we had built, such a strategy would have failed. But now there was a wild card in the equation that could trigger all kinds of unintended consequences.

I was that wild card. As the sole target of the defense in the Torres case, I would predictably become the poster boy for a police cover-up in any Suge Knight trial. I had already been accused of “reckless disregard” in my faulty preparation of a search warrant. It would be irresistible for any defense attorney to point out to a jury that I had authored the vast majority of documents in the Biggie case, up to and including several search warrants.

None of this occurred to me as I sat in Gannon’s office that morning. I was in shock, overwhelmed by rage and sorrow and the troubling feeling that somehow I was to blame for what had just happened. Had I been, as the press painted me in the heat of the Torres trial, “overzealous”? Had I become too involved in the Biggie case, too close to the victims and the perpetrators? I had gotten to know these people on a first-name basis, trying not to be their judge and jury, to sort out their sins, but simply to do my job. Was there some invisible line I had stepped over, separating the professional from the personal? Was this payback for that indiscretion?

The rush of emotions I was feeling was more than I could handle. I needed to get away, out of that office, out of that building, and try to come to terms with what had just happened. But even then I felt a tug of responsibility. “Commander Gannon,” I said, finally overcoming the quaking in my voice. “Sir, there is one thing I’d like to request.”

“What is it, Greg?” he replied, and I thought I could hear a faint note of regret in his voice. Not that it mattered, but in that moment I think he understood what I was going through.

I swallowed hard. “Please make sure that whoever takes over for me on this case has the ability and experience to finish what we started.”

“Of course,” he said, but I didn’t break the stare that was fixed between us.

“Sir,” I said with all the sincerity I could muster. “I’m begging you.” I turned and left without another word. The meeting had lasted ten minutes. It was the longest ten minutes of my life.

I didn’t immediately tell anyone on the team what had happened. It was too soon and there were too many untethered thoughts colliding in my mind. I slipped out of the office and headed home. It was on that long stretch of freeway that I began slowly but surely to put my suspension from the task force into a larger context.

My hindsight is as perfect as the next guy’s, and with 20/20 vision I was beginning to see how all this fit into the larger context of the LAPD’s unspoken but ironclad policies. The department has long tended toward those actions and decisions that would ensure its own survival, even at the cost of its public responsibility. I’m not accusing the LAPD of corruption — like any other large metropolitan police force it has its share of crooked cops — but what the LAPD is guilty of is, in some ways, worse. It isn’t just incompetence. It is a lack of conviction, an institutional inability to do the right thing by its officers and, more important, by those it is sworn to serve.

In some ways, I suppose, the decision to remove me could be seen as a prudent response to a difficult situation. Given the stains on the department’s reputation, trying the Biggie Smalls murder case would have certainly been problematic. I understood that. It was one of the reasons I had pushed for insulating the investigation by federalizing the task force at its inception. I knew that, when the time came, the department would need to be protected against the inevitable accusations of complicity. But instead, when the time came, the department blinked. Rather than manning up to bring these killers to justice, it chose to hedge its bets, letting the investigation die an unnatural death rather than risk the potentially damaging, but ultimately insubstantial, flak that would surely come its way. It was all too easy to throw me under the bus rather than follow the investigation to its righteous outcome.

Of course, the department had a long history of overreaction to perceived threats to its existence. The Rampart Scandal of the late nineties was a prime example. Based on the allegations of Rafael Perez, a crooked cop if ever there was one, the LAPD fired, suspended, or reassigned dozens of good officers at the division. Instead of weathering a storm of public outrage over a scandal that had no merit, the department besmirched the reputations of some of its finest. It was a decision that would come back to haunt it, in the form of numerous civil suits filed by the disgraced officers, which would eventually cost the city millions of dollars in settlements and restitution.

But the brass hadn’t learned from that expensive experience. It was doing the same thing all over again, this time to me. I was a decorated officer, a veteran investigator at the top of my field. But because of a “perception” I was deemed too compromised to continue leading a high-profile case.

At least that’s what they told me. As I traced the ribbon of freeway out of downtown and into the open stretches of suburbia, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what was true anymore and what was a lie. I was hurting. That’s all I knew.

It took me the better part of a year to get over that hurt, to finally begin to understand what happened, and to do something about it.

CHAPTER
27

Policy and Procedure

O
VER THE COURSE OF
that year I remained at the LAPD, even as my anger and anguish over the action that had been taken, regularly rose and fell. In the immediate aftermath of my removal from the task force, my initial impulse was to simply take my retirement. It was my friends and family who urged me to step back from my raw emotions and carefully consider my next move. They were right. I needed time to sort out my conflicts and confusion.

And one of the most conflicted and confusing issues I faced had to do with the way the department was treating me in the aftermath of its decision. Instead of regarding me as a pariah, whose reputation, as they claimed, had been indelibly stained, they told me to take my pick of any job I wanted. The offer compounded the disconnect I was feeling about the department’s true motives for removing me from the task force. If I had been so fatally compromised by my involvement in the Torres case, why would they hand me any plum assignment I asked for? Wouldn’t it make more sense to stick me away in some musty desk job, out of sight and out of mind?